rocker VS distrobox

I am, strictly speaking, not a big R user, so take my opinion with a grain of salt, but if I were using R extensively, I would absolutely use the Rocker project containers to manage different R versions and different sets of dependencies for different projects: https://rocker-project.org/

Perhaps the main difference is r package are not available as binaries from rstudio (posit) repo but their is a cran2copr repo that works really well or you can still install from source in your home. For more info on cran2copr see: https://cran.rstudio.com/bin/linux/fedora/ . Personally I am slowly moving to container based workflow with podman (and not toolbox as you end up having your r package install directly in home but that can be worked out by specifying the ribs path). I use docker image from the rocker project: https://rocker-project.org/

If you have such specific requirements it’s often easier to use a container like the one from rocker (runs in der docker) instead. Btw wouldn’t be surprised if you’d get the latest version running in there as well.

Check out the Rocker Project, comprising of Docker containers for R, and can be used with RStudio. Also, virtual environments e.g., renv package can also help solve the package versioning issue, aside from containerization, and is transferable to a new machine via the renv::restore() function.

https://hub.docker.com/u/rocker has a lot of R-related images and they look pretty legit (look at "Tags" to find different versions). Don't use weird looking images. There's a lot of malware out there. Here's a guide on nice docker files: https://docs.docker.com/develop/develop-images/dockerfile\_best-practices/

Other people have mentioned renv and packrat already (hasn't renv basically superseded packrat at this point?), but what is also nearly ready-made to deal with this is rocker's R images. They have a bunch of images preconfigured for typical TidyVerse stuff, Shiny, etc.

The Apple M1 is ARM. As far as my knowledge, ARM isn't supported. Looks like the rocker project is aware of it. Considering how popular these chips are, i'm confident a lot of smart people are working on it. :)

But, with docker, there are many prebuilt images provided by the RStudio team directly, and other great repositories from rocker. These are basically images for your full SDLC with R, from development to deployments.

Distrobox is a tool that enables us to try Linux distro CLI, including their package manager. This requires a containerization tool (e.g., Docker). In Windows, this can be achieved using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

I use containerized versions of things, ubuntu and chainguard images mostly.

You can always create containers with init if that's how you want to do that though. Some distros publish images that come that way: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505448 ... https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_...

Yes, you can do that but I've seen others use something like distrobox to run linux inside of SteamOS: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/steamdeck_guide.md

For such cases you might use something like this: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

Btw #3: Depending on what the user is trying to accomplish, e.g. maybe to make WSL(2) itself more of a "subsystem" than a "container engine", using something like Distrobox or nsbox.dev can be a good idea (along with Docker or Podman in Distrobox's case; the other one uses systemd-nspawn).

1. Find here in "Containers Distros" section the distro image that you want to install ("Toolbox" versions are better because they are configured for Distrobox) and get it URL: https://distrobox.it/compatibility/#containers-distros 2. Use that URL to create Distrobox: distrobox create -i registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox:39 -n fedora_1_39 3. Enter Distrobox fedora_1_39: distrobox enter fedora_1_39 4. You are already in Distrobox console. Look at the name in console, it should be include the container name. 5. To exit Distrobox: exit 6. If you run: distrobox list you will see all distroboxes on the system. You will also see that distrobox that we exited is still running. 7. To stop distrobox use commands: distrobox stop fedora_1_39