Good points from both of you. I’ve been working on automating my R setups for teams, so here’s a more structured take.
When folks ask me how to update R, I always say: yes, downloading from CRAN manually is still the way to go, RStudio doesn’t handle core updates.
But what makes the whole process less painful for me now is the {pak} package. After installing the new R version, I open RStudio and run:
install.packages("pak")
pak::pak(c("tidyverse", "data.table", "whatever-you-use"))
It’s blazing fast with dependencies and makes reinstallation feel like a breeze.
I also recommend using {renv} if you’re working on projects. Snapshot your package environment before the update. Then restore it after. Super clean and reproducible.
So, yeah, updating R isn’t one-click simple yet, but with a mix of installr, package saving, or pak/renv, it’s very manageable.