What kind of problems are you having with it? I'm using npm on Windows and it's working out great! I'm actually using it as my build/task runner rather than using bloated grunt or gulp. It's easy to configure and read. I run my linter, unit test, jscs, and bundler all configured in package.json.

I also install git bash and conemu to have bash on Windows which makes things much better. I don't use windows console.

My experience is that Npm "kinda works" on Windows. There are mysterious race-conditions and annoying bugs. And I'm not even talking about npm being technically completely incompatible with Windows due to the 256 character path limitation.

I had a global environment variable conflict because something else was named "node.exe"... =/

It's not just npm. A while back I had to set up a Rails dev environment for a client who used Windows. shudder.

Never had any problem with it when we did a Cordova based application for a customer of ours.

There are quite a few packages in npm that require native compilation of some part of their system during install. These usually fail horribly on windows without spending a lot of time tweaking your system in ways you probably don't want to. This is in sad contrast to how well many of the other libraries just work.

I would have thought it'd be possible to emscripten compile something like tinyC, and make a C compiler you could naturally fit into the node ecosystem to build native libraries.

I see. However that is a common problem in any platform that doesn't follow the UNIX way.

I imagine node.js for IBM i or z/OS to have similar issues.

This is almost certainly true, and if there were as many people trying to use node on those operating systems as there are on windows I expect you would see a similar number of complaints.