On November 26, 2020, Jelle Licht <jlicht@fsfe.org> wrote:

On other distros it defaults to a location that is not writable by
normal users either;

Indeed I can confirm that Ubuntu node also has this problem.

Node doesn't do this on other distros either, correct?
[snip]
Another way folks solved this problem has been using "nvm" which in
practice boiled down to [setting a
custom global prefix, just managed by nvm now].

I think Guix should work more like nvm than like other distros in this case. If this is something we could handle automatically per-profile, then that gives us the opportunity to do the right thing and save the user some hassle.

If we decide not to go that route, I agree that we're doing no worse than other distros that package Node. But I'm rarely satisfied with the status quo :)