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Problems with RStudio for mac

19 messages · Jeff Newmiller, Kevin Ushey, roy +5 more

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Hi,

I am not sure if this is the right forum for this query, and I apologize in
advance.
I recently upgraded to version R 4.5.1, and I use the RStudio program. I
can open it without any problem, but I am experiencing crashes whenever I
perform any action in the program. I receive the following message:
"R Session Aborted. R encountered a fatal error. The session was
terminated. Start New Session."

Could you please recommend what I should do?

Thank you very much
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I find RStudio is very reliable.

Seeing that the problems started when you installed R 4.5.1, then I would reinstall it. It might also be helpful to see what happens if you just run R.

Ken
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I followed your recommendation, uninstalled R and reinstalled it, also
running only R.
If I run only R, it works without problems. Then I tried RStudio again and
the problem persists.


El lun, 14 jul 2025 a las 22:33, Ken Beath (<ken at kjbeath.id.au>) escribi?:

  
    
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R is maintained by the volunteer R Core group, while RStudio is maintained by Posit. You may get more thorough help with RStudio if you ask at the Posit forum.

That said, as a rule the RStudio team has to play "catch-up" when R is upgraded by R Core. You may be running an older version of RStudio that does not know how to deal with R 4.5.1. Check for a newer version of RStudio, or try uninstalling R 4.5.1 and re-installing an older version R... or try using R with a different text editor (there are a lot of them). RStudio is a fine option, but it is not the only way to use R.
On July 14, 2025 5:54:47 PM PDT, "Jos? Carlos Guerrero Ant?nez" <jcgantunez at gmail.com> wrote:

  
    
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Thank you Jeff for your suggestions, I will keep them in mind.




El lun, 14 jul 2025 a las 22:45, Jeff Newmiller (<jdnewmil at dcn.davis.ca.us>)
escribi?:

  
    
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Did you already try installing the latest available release of RStudio? In
general, R and RStudio should be upgraded together.

If you still have problems with the latest release of RStudio, you should
file a big report at https://github.com/rstudio/rstudio/issues.

On Mon, Jul 14, 2025, 6:54?PM Jos? Carlos Guerrero Ant?nez <
jcgantunez at gmail.com> wrote:

            

  
  
roy
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Hi Jos?
fwiw, I tried R 4.5.1 on my macmini (15.5, Intel) with an old version of
RStudio and received the same similar error you reported.  When I updated
to the latest RStudio (Version 2025.05.1+513 (2025.05.1+513)) my quick test
(matrix multiplication) worked without error.

cheers, roy
On Mon, Jul 14, 2025 at 8:42?PM Kevin Ushey <kevinushey at gmail.com> wrote:

            

  
  
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Thanks Kevin and Roy,
I work with two old Macs with the BigSur operating system (one at home and
one at school) and I can't upgrade, which prevents me from having the
newest version of RStudio because it doesn't meet the requirements.
I wanted to install the caretSDM package, on the Mac at home I had version
4.3.3 and the package recommended me to use a newer version of R and I
upgraded to version 4.5.1. In the case of the faculty Mac I am using
version R.4.4.0 and I have no problem with the caretSDM package.
the conflict with R version 4.5.1.

Best regards,

El mar, 15 jul 2025 a las 1:02, roy (<rollinforall at gmail.com>) escribi?:

  
    
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Jos?,

I agree that latest RStudio dropping support for a very large number of Macs is unfortunate. It may be worth raising it with Posit - we have very deliberately not increased the macOS version requirement of R binaries, because it would affect way too may R users based on the estimates from weblogs (as Intel Mac owners simply cannot upgrade).

That said, in the meantime you can install any older R version as well - see 

https://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/big-sur-x86_64/base/

to match the last working RStudio to see if it will work for your use case.

Of course, for regular work you can switch to the Mac GUI which always supports the same macOS version as R, or any of the other GUI alternatives that don?t embed R.

Cheers,
Simon
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I?m neither a Posit/RStudio employee/dev nor do I use their IDEs atm, 
but ? while RStudio IDE requires MacOS 13+, the ?next-gen? IDE from 
Posit is Positron, and it allegedly depends only on MacOS 10.15+ with 
universal, intel, and arm64 binaries. See 
https://positron.posit.co/download.html.

I?ve played briefly with it, and while I?m an avid emacs/ess user (never 
been much for RStudio IDE itself), the Positron experience is getting 
much closer to what I hope for. There are discussions on migrating 
(keyboard shortcuts, mental assumptions, etc) from RStudio IDE to reduce 
the change, and I believe there are few things one can do in RStudio 
that are not also feasible in Positron.

Good luck,
Bill
On 7/15/25 18:36, Simon Urbanek wrote:

            
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Thanks Bill for the recommendation.
I installed Positron but I got this message, it doesn't seem to connect
with R.

R 4.5.1 failed to start up (exit code -1)

The kernel exited before a connection could be established
dyld: Symbol not found:
__ZTTNSt3__118basic_stringstreamIcNS_11char_traitsIcEENS_9allocatorIcEEEE
Referenced from:
/Applications/Positron.app/Contents/Resources/app/extensions/positron-r/resources/ark/ark
Expected in: /usr/lib/libc++.1.dylib
in
/Applications/Positron.app/Contents/Resources/app/extensions/positron-r/resources/ark/ark

El mi?, 16 jul 2025 a las 7:14, <bill+rsigmac at 8pawexpress.com> escribi?:

  
    
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Big Sur is no longer supported by Apple (it reached EOL in September 2023)
so you're unfortunately likely to continue to run into these sorts of
issues if you cannot upgrade your OS.

On Wed, Jul 16, 2025, 6:07?PM Jos? Carlos Guerrero Ant?nez <
jcgantunez at gmail.com> wrote:

            

  
  
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Jos?,

Yes, this is a bug in the Positron build (here its Jupyter kernel) - it doesn?t really support the macOS version it claims - that particular symbol was introduced in macOS 12 SDK, so it requires at least that version if not higher, so the claim on the website is false - thus not really an alternative. As Kevin signalled, it seems Posit is ok with dropping Intel Mac support so, unfortunately, the only two options are either to downgrade R + RStudio or use latest R with another GUI.

Cheers,
Simon
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Kevin,

You may have missed one key part: large fraction of Intel Mac users cannot upgrade, because Apple removed many Intel Mac drivers from more recent macOS versions, so many R users have no choice - they cannot upgrade even if they wanted to - which why we see so many R users using macOS < 13. The question of EOL support becomes irrelevant if it is the only way to keep a perfectly good machine running. That?s why it is important for R to keep supporting macOS 11 and higher at least for the x86_64 builds (arm64 is fine so far, Apple is currently supporting all Apple Silicon Macs in the latest macOS). One could say that Apple is becoming the victim of their own hardware quality :).

Cheers,
Simon
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The problem is that it uses the Electron framework, and it isn?t supported on earlier versions of MacOS. 

Ken
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Ken,

That's not true, Positron is based on Electron 34 which supports macOS 11 just fine (as do all stable releases of Electron). The breakage comes from the Jupyter R kernel which ostensibly was intended to be backward compatible (with minos set to 10.12 which is ancient) so it looks like an oversight at build time more than an intention. That is not to say that reliance on such a long list of 3rd party code doesn't have problems in that regard, so I wouldn?t hold my breath (Electron did announce the intent to break it in the future releases).

Cheers,
Simon
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I got a bit confused with Apples?s strange MacOS version numbers. Anyway Electron 38, which is out in a month or two drops support for Big Sur.

Support for MacOS 13 means that most, but not all, Macs after 2017 are supported, which is not a bad effort.

Ken
4 days later
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At least for a while, it seems that only support has been dropped; the RStudio binaries still work under MacOS 12. (Or, I haven't managed to break anything yet.)

(It is not strictly an Intel/ARM issue: Some Intel Macs do go beyond OS 13, MB Air from 2019 stops at Sonoma, but I think Intel MBs from that year runs Sequoia. Both my iMacs from 2015 are off support but still very capable machines.)  

-pd

  
    
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Hi,

I reinstalled R to version 4.4.3 and now R Studio is working correctly.

Thanks for everything.

El lun, 21 jul 2025 a las 11:53, peter dalgaard (<pdalgd at gmail.com>)
escribi?: