If you do any serious Ruby/NodeJS work then forget built-in packages. Ruby has been notoriously bad for distro packagers (http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/blog/?p=617) and NodeJS is moving too fast to newer versions at the moment. You are likely to need run multiple versions of them which is not possible with most package managers. Distro packages are meant to be stable (read: ancient) dependencies for other packages.

You will need a good stable base system and the best text editor you can get. And get a 64-bit system then you can run docker containers. These are like virtual machines with almost no overhead. Docker makes it possible to install various combos of apache/nginx/mysql/mongodb/redis/nodejs/ruby/rubygems without them screwing up each other or your base system. I strongly recommend to check it out.

My choice for distro/text editor has been Slackware/Kate. I deploy to Debian and Slackware in production. For dockers I use Ubuntu as the base image.