Nix and Guix node packages are 8.2 and 8.1 respectively. Nix can't seem to find a couchdb package and guix is 1.6.1

Arch package have node 8.5.0 and couch is 2.1.0

When I read blogs about new software and I can't just packagemanager install/update it on I don't really see any more value than living on windows installing exe's from websites.

Every distro I've used except arch has a real case of documentation not living up to what's actually happening. I've used fedora a lot and it's sometimes hard to find current version docs. But what's worse it hard to know if 2+ versions ago docs are ok because that particular bit hasn't changed.