Is your R configured to compile all packages from source? I switched laptops about two months ago and my experience was really painless.

My R is default configuration pretty much. Must be something odd though if painless for you.

This depends on operating system - CRAN only has packages for Windows and Mac but not Linux. But you can work this around by using conda-forge with mamba solver which is super fast and platform agnostic and has rhumba interface: github.com/mamba-org/rhumba

Came here to say this. Use binaries whenever possible. This should be no problem on Mac/Win. I just updated R on Ubuntu and used the available binaries via `apt` — much faster

But the apt packages often out of date, especially on my hpc, and when cran wants you to test in latest devel version and your package stupidly depends on ggplot2 which has a gazillion dependencies itself. I'll explore rhumba tho

Ah yes, on the HPC this won’t work necessarily. The apt repo is fine and will deliver up-to-date binaries but you have a bottleneck in your HPC maintainers.

Worth noting that you probably mean CRAN apt. The default only gets security updates outside of Ubuntu 6mo release cycle. The CRAN one (cran.r-project.org/bin/linux…) does a good job but I don't like how they force minor version updates (pushing 4.1 on channel which was 4.0).

There's also the new binaries from @eddelbuettel at github.com/eddelbuettel/r2u/ with bspm package it works very well. Might be worth for faster docker checks

Yes, I just noticed the new post from @eddelbuettel on using apt on Ubuntu

just tried this - lightning fast on my laptop where I have sudo privileges