As someone who has no choice but to use Windows at work, I'm really sick of all the problems that crop up because so many tools use were written by people who won't use Windows and haven't tested anything on it.
I write software for fun, I release it on github, and some people find it useful. If there are other people who don't, they can improve it for their own purposes, or they can find or write something better. I don't think anybody has a right to expect me to support Microsoft's product. That's insane.
True enough, though it's also fair to consider a language/platform/ecosystem inferior for some work if it relies on that kind of individual and often less portable contribution for its effectiveness. A lot of FOSS advocates will promote community support and a broad contributor base as advantages of that style of development, but there is another side to that coin, which is that sometimes you get just what you (didn't) pay for and you're on your own in terms of support or working around any problems.
Doesnt Microsoft have their own V8 or node.js fork now?
So now you get just a little, watered-down taste of using the non-preferred platform for something.
npmjs cares about the enterprise + windows.
For instance - OS X window managers suck. Do you think that a project like Spectacle should have never been built because they're just picking up Apple's slack?
Microsoft is very happy that Node, Java, Clojure, etc work on Windows. It helps them a lot. But they make little to no effort to help bridge the gap, they usually leave that to everyone else. That's my gripe, right there.
And to be fair, this is not a black and white situation. It's complex and Microsoft's role in all of this is complex too. And sometimes this issue does crop up on other OSes, for example Docker on OSX is sometimes a little painful.
OK, but that's also where you're wrong, right there. In general, but also particularly for this exact issue - Microsoft considered attempting to fix the file path limit for the first release of Windows 10. Maybe you don't understand, but it's going to take a herculean effort to fix this. They want to do it and if you need proof of that I can find posts of them talking about what I just said.
Why they can't fix .Net under the covers to use UNC in windows to avoid the class of problem I don't know, understand or comprehend... and that's just one very common platform for windows. I would say the same for npm/node and libuv for that matter.
I use bash a lot in windows (installed with msysgit), and that's got it's own set of problems. More problematic is the number of node modules that rely on bash scripts for builds, that don't work at all in windows.... which makes it very hard to contribute.
npm is also a bit different, in your objection: they're a company. Companies need users. Supporting more platforms to get more users seems like pretty much, well, business as usual.
should we not pick up capitalism's slack? capitalism sure isn't going to pick up its own slack, err... systemic method of restricting underprivileged/poor people's access to power.
Wow, this is incredibly wrong. The cost of education to learn Linux is living in a country where you are likely to be literate and have access to a computer. That is literally the cost to learn Linux, guy. There is nothing like an MSDN subscription for Linux documentation.
Microsoft should finally fix the MAX_PATH issue in Windows, but npm should just fix their software: it's too important to be that buggy.