node (vs. nodejs) is required when installing electron about electron-prebuilt

[MarshallOfSound]

GitHub issues are for feature requests and bug reports, questions about using Electron should be directed to the community or to the Slack Channel.

FWIW this behavior is expected, npm relies on node so it won't work without it

[uri247]

I suspect I'm misunderstood about the essence of this issue. This is not a question or a support issue. It is definitely a feature request, arguably a bug.

• Node is installed on my machine.
• On Debian and Ubuntu distribution, the node executable name is nodejs. See issue #4772 on NodeJS database (nodejs/node-v0.x-archive#4772).
• I had no problem workaround the issue. The canonical work around is to create a symbolic link from node to nodejs - and this way supporting packages that have 'node' hard coded, including electron.
• I seriously suggest you reopen this issue. Most packages support it. Ubuntu is not a small distribution.

[MarshallOfSound]

@uri247 I'll cc some people on this to discuss but as far as I am aware the nodejs package on linux is legacy and unsupported. The version it installs 0.10 / 0.12 is actually end of life according to node's LTS schedule. And all common node install techniques for linux (that aren't this legacy package) install the correct executable (node).

I am of the opinion that this is an issue with how node was installed in the legacy package and not an issue with electron calling node install.js.

What do you think @malept ?

[malept]

Ubuntu 17.04 installs Node 4.x (has been since at least 16.04). That being said, it's really odd that nodejs-legacy exists (the package that provides the nodejs ➡️ node symlink), from a Node ecosystem point of view. (It makes slightly more sense from a Debian packaging POV...)

My opinion is that we should add to the docs "requires nodejs-legacy installed when using the system Node packages on Debian/Ubuntu."

[MarshallOfSound]

My opinion is that we should add to the docs "requires nodejs-legacy installed when using the system Node packages on Debian/Ubuntu."

Sounds good to me 👍