Mac is very popular among frontend developers, exactly because of issues you experienced above.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that something which takes 5 minutes to setup in Mac, is an unknown factor in Windows 
(could literally take days or weeks to figure out).
Step by Step installation guide for Mac:
- Install Brew (it may ask you to install Xcode dev tools - do that first)
- Install frontend tools
# Install Node version manager
brew install nvm
# Install latest Node.js version 12
nvm install 12
# Set Node 12 as the default version
nvm alias default 12
# Install Yarn package manager
brew install yarn
# Install Babylon Project
git clone https://github.com/ecoinomist/babylon-next.git
cd babylon-next
yarn
yarn dev
I don’t know your Mac setup, but if nvm command isn’t working, you may need to add this in .bash_profile:
# Node Package Manager
export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
source $(brew --prefix nvm)/nvm.sh
Then in terminal:
source ~/.bash_profile