Here's the thing: The lack of a simple or well documented installation process does not matter for commercial organisations.
I don't care about these users because they have access to someone like you who has done it before / understands the decisions / knows how to get help.
But Node-red is a comprehensive programming environment with a low learning curve and a well designed user interface. It's great for schoolchildren who have a Windows Home PC, also for the increasing population of retired folk who are happy to embrace technology.
The Raspberry Pi computer was specifically produced for use by students and Dave's script probably gives the right degree of hand-holding for these users.
But it is named the Raspberry Pi Script. While it works on other Debian distros, it does not work for every Linux.
Similarly, Portable Apps is for Windows. I believe I can use my apps on a USB stick in Intel or AMD driven computers, but it surely would not work in a Mac, and I don't know about Atom (Chromebooks?)
For this limited market though it's great.
I can use LibreOffice and The Gimp in the coffee shop. I can take a website prototype to a customer for review.
If it could be done, this (or similar) would be perfect for trying Node-red on a PC too. No installation difficulties, just a basic set of the components needed for it to work.
Unfortunately I have no idea if it is possible, though I recognise that Julian and Steve have said node.js apps are more complex than the software packages currently available on Portable Apps.
When I retire, I will, perhaps, extend my alternate installer (which is cross platform but incomplete in the sense that it doesn't deal with node.js nor with setting up a service) to be more inclusive and complete. Until then, for the people you mention, the existing instructions should work. If they don't, we can revisit them and improve them if people can share the issues.
The problem with the original question that started this thread was not so much the instructions but rather that the OP hit an edge-case. This clearly happens on Linux too occasionally.
I'm surprised that coffee shop PC's aren't locked down to prevent random souls off the street coming in and running random malware!! I would certainly never use a coffee shop PC that wasn't.
The answer to the coffee shop conundrum is the same as for locked-down enterprise environments - to use web-based tools, not local installs. Node-RED can accommodate that as well of course, in a whole variety of ways for different needs.
Should I be worried, as I didn't face any issues in installing and running node-red on a clean windows 11 machine (as a NSSM service) in a corporate environment ?
Odd numbered versions are considered development versions. They tend to be much less stable. Only even numbers are LTS versions which are strongly recommended for sanities sake.
Virtual machine... You'll just get it working on windows only to have it blow up in your face at the worst possible time. Many advantages to virtualization.
Clearly not many restrictions for you.
