[R-SIG-Mac] Transitioning from Mac to LInux?

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 01/04/2020 2:48 p.m., Carl Witthoft wrote:
> 
>    If I should ask over at r-sig-debian instead of here, please tell me.
> I don't wish to clog r-sig-mac with off-topic stuff.
> 
> 
> I've been watching the massive headaches people are dealing with trying
> to keep R fully compatible with each MacOS X upgrade,  I'm wondering
> whether replacing my iMac (2009) with a new Mac really makes sense from
> an R - user point of view, as opposed to getting some inexpensive
> desktop and installing Linux.  I know I can run R and RStudio under
> Linux, for example,  but don't know what limitations, if any there are
> when it comes to building packages from source, getting compatible
> compilers,  and so on.
> 
> What have some of you 'power R users' discovered when/if you tried to
> build , or incorporate Bioconductor or other repository's packages under
> Linux?
> 
> 

If your iMac is still working, try installing Ubuntu or some other Linux 
on it.  I think at that age Apple is no longer providing upgrades, but I 
just put Ubuntu on a 2008 iMac, and it works well.  (I needed to upgrade 
the memory, but that just cost $40 for 4 GB.)

So I got a $40 desktop, with a nice screen.

Duncan Murdoch