I really wish we as an industry moved away from distributing tools as Node packages. I guess the thinking is “hey, you build websites, you’d have Node already, it’ll be easy for you to install this package (and us to distribute it).” First of all, I may build websites, but not with Node (if I can help it). And second of all, there’s no such thing as “having Node.” Different packages would work on different version of Nodes, and because each distribution requires, on average, 42.1 bajillion dependencies, any one of them could break when your version of Node falls out of date. How is that easy?

The alternative? Anything else! Personally I would prefer static binaries either distributed via Homebrew (for Mac) or RPM/DEB for Linux. Or heck, just offer them as a zip. Don’t make me think about dependencies I don’t care about.