Thank you for the reply! It's great to see devs interacting on HN. I've written thousands of lines of Ansible playbooks, and I'm a huge fan. I see others on my

Thank you for the reply! It's great to see devs interacting on HN. I've written thousands of lines of Ansible playbooks, and I'm a huge fan. I see others on my team struggling with these very basic on-boarding issues, that I think aren't perhaps obvious when you're so embedded in the Linux mindset. You should absolutely think of your software, even though it's free, as having a conversion funnel to happy users. You are competing both against established players like Chef and Puppet, as well as new up and comers like Salt. Once a potential user reaches ansible.com, at every single step of the on-boarding that follows you will have some % of attrition to your competitors and apathy. The more steps, the larger the attrition, the smaller your userbase is. Think of it this way; if you add a new feature, you may gain some small percentage of users. But if you reduce the on-boarding attrition rate from 30% to, 1-2%, you will gain a simply massive amount of users over time. Do you know or track your conversion rate? The best docs is no docs. When curious Mac user visits http://www.vagrantup.com/ http://www.vagrantup.com/ they see the download button, they click the Mac installer, and they're done. At no point during the on-boarding does installing the software require even seeing the docs. Mac users and even devs expect DMGs these days. Everything from 'git', to 'vagrant', come in DMGs. On most sites (like git), you visit the front page and it autodetects you are on Mac and gives you the DMG, which every Mac user will immediately know how to use. Git comes installed by default in Macs these days. Most people on Mac never need to install git anymore. The DMG file for git on Mac has 11,000+ weekly downloads on git-scm.com (that's in addition to the brews and ports of the world, which I would imagine have less users). How would you like an extra 11K downloads a week? ;) The tide has definitely turned in favor of Macs over the last 3 years in software shops, I see more and more developers using Macs exclusively for development. In my company, although all software gets deployed to Linux (on AWS), of the several hundred devs working on the software I would be surprised if more than a handful (like me) still use Linux on their development machines (deploying to Vagrant locally and the like). While many of the Mac converts are coming from Linux, most new devs are just given a MacBook Pro from day one. In this new reality, I fear that you are doing yourself a big disservice by trying to shoehorn the Linux software distribution models on the new Mac users.