Sounds like you just got lucky with the versions you happened to need vs what the system versions were on your version/distro of Linux. It's not like Linux has a built-in solution to the problem, you can definitely still have issues with conflicting versions.

BTW, on either platform your best bet IMO is installing all your scripting languages within some kind of version manager. I like pyenv, rbenv, and nodenv since they work exactly the same way between the three languages.