Honestly I would say just learn Docker. It only takes a few days, a week tops. You make a container with Mongo and one with Node, network them together, map the Express port and the data volumes for db/code/build to the host machine, and live happily ever after.

Which is super clean, not distro-dependent, reproducible, portable, easy to backup, you can swap Mongo and Node versions or use multiple versions side by side as you please, and you can use whatever features you want from the home distro without impacting anything in your dev stack.