Installation on Windows and MacOS unclear from documentation

[morales-gregorio]

Hi,

I am preparing some lectures with NEST Desktop for the University of Cologne. I found that the documentation relating to installation in Windows and MacOS (with Docker) seems to be incomplete, it instructs the user to download Docker and that's it, does one have to still download the same .yml file as for Linux? I would suggest extending the documentation about it since it is currently unclear (and I am unfamiliar with docker on Win/Mac)

On Linux I had no problems getting started and also the tutorials are fantastic to design exercises :)

Best,
Aitor

[jens-br]

Hi Aitor,
thanks for reaching out! Nice to hear that you like the Linux version and the tutorials! 👍

It is correct that the installation in Windows is not described in great detail, I'm sorry! At the moment we are reworking the documentation in general, which will need some time. It should work using the same Dockerfile as for Linux - there should be only differences in how to install Docker.

If you search for possibilities that those students in your lecture can use NEST Desktop easily, I would recommend you to have a look at the NEST Desktop instance on the European EBRAINS (formerly HBP) platform: https://nest-desktop.apps.hbp.eu
Everyone can use it after the creation of a (free) EBRAINS account, so this might be the easiest start.

If you need some support or suggestions for your course, we would be glad to help out. We do this for other courses also, so this would be no problem! Would it be possible to receive some feedback from the participants at the end? There would be no further effort required on your part, we have already standardized and comparable online questionnaires for this. This would help us to identify possible improvements quicker.

I will report back here in this issue when the revised version of the documentation is live. You can see the current changes if you select the doc branch on ReadTheDocs, but it is not ready at the moment and still lacks the description of the installation procedure on Windows/Mac.

Thank you very much!