Okay then your comment is weird, windows & mac dont have distribution with node versions lower then LTS. It can be an issue on ubuntu/linux having an outdated registry. But nextjs clearly states minimum node version in their docs: https://nextjs.org/docs/getting-started/installation

And how to install every version you want NVM, that's on the user if it didn't work. That's not something different then can happen with PHP or other tools as mysql in the LAMP setup.

The context here is the "starting with" situation. It's much easier to do that with PHP since you normally don't have to care about versions there - barely anything requires version higher than in LTS. On the other side it doesn't matter what is clearly documented, or which registry is up to date - a person looking at this for the first time is either going to have an easier life or not. Nextjs effectively has extra steps you need to know about and follow.

that's simply not true. nodejs v12 is years old, its like using php5 and lots of platforms don't support 5 anymore.

Security support for node 12 ended in 2022. For php5, in 2018. Those are very different.

Rhel 7 is still alive, supports node 8, maybe 12, but nothing higher officially.

Yeah that's more an issue with Rhel, but you can solve that easily with NVM https://tecadmin.net/install-nvm-centos-8/

Why do you have to wait?

It's fairly normal to run some version of `npm run serve` with a filesystem watcher that will hot-reload changes as they occur so that you can see changes every time you hit :w (or CMD+S or whatever saves a file on your filesystem)

The context is about the initial setup and the parent comment recommended vercel git flow. Yes, you can run it locally, but that's back to the "getting started" issues: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39286669

You really think nextjs is difficult just because one person you knew had a very outdated nodejs version; it's really not.

Okay. I think it's fair to say that if you don't install the tool you're developing in, it does make it much harder to work in locally.

That's equally true of PHP.

Moreover, it's equally true that distros aren't always shipping the latest PHP versions, and that there are similar flamewars surrounding phpenv/pvm as there are nvm/asdf. There are options, and people have opinions. The more ensconced one gets in an ecosystem, the more easy it is to know which tools offer which benefits relative to your needs. None of those decisions are easily made when new to an ecosystem -- Elixir is newish and has enough coalescence around most of the mainstream things, but as someone new to it, if I needed to choose between Cowboy and Bandit, I would have quite a bit of learning required upfront.