Thank goodness we don’t have to install arbitrary Visual Studio dependencies like with some Python packages …Įssentially, I think you may want to consider using WSL2 with R if you anticipate having compilation issues for your packages on Windows that could be sidestepped by using Linux.ĭownloading R binaries from conda is a great alternative, but conda’s pretty heavy and I wouldn’t recommend running R from conda in parallel with R, at least on Windows.

While I haven’t had problems with this setup, I’ve seen people facing issues on Twitter. With R 4.0, compiling packages requires Rtools4.0, which requires adding the Rtools home to the. In comparison, Linux does not, however if you use RStudio Package Manager as a package source you’ll have access to package binaries for Linux.

Using R with Windows has the big advantage of having binaries on CRAN available for the latest version of packages. And in general I think that would be the case for most people. R does work fine with Windows, at least as far as I use it. For certain reasons, you may want to run R in Linux instead of Windows, and WSL can help.Īs of the time of writing, the current version of WSL is WSL2. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a great way to run Linux software on your computer without dual-booting or starting over.

Okay that’s great, but I want to keep my IDE!.

Installing r on windows