Transitioning from Mac to LInux?
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