RStudio being removed from Tumbleweed — how to keep it working?

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1

Hi everyone,
I’m a long-time Tumbleweed user and RStudio is absolutely essential for my PhD work in Health Sciences. During a recent zypper dup -d, I saw that RStudio (rstudio and rstudio-desktop) is going to be removed, due to the removal of several libboost 1.86 packages:

The following 9 packages are going to be REMOVED:
boost-license1_86_0 libboost_chrono1_86_0 libboost_filesystem1_86_0 libboost_iostreams1_86_0 libboost_program_options1_86_0
libboost_thread1_86_0 ovpn-dco-kmp-default-0.2.20241216~git0.a08b2fd_k6.14.4_1-2.30 rstudio rstudio-desktop

I know that maintaining some packages becomes difficult with rolling releases, but RStudio is still very widely used in research and academia. Also:

  • The Flatpak version doesn’t seem to exist (com.rstudio.RStudio not found on Flathub).
  • The official tarball depends on system Boost libs, which Tumbleweed is now removing.
  • Locking the Boost 1.86 packages (zypper al) only postpones the issue and breaks future upgrades.

I’m wondering:

Is there any plan to keep RStudio in Factory or rebuild it for a newer Boost? Should we consider a container or chroot approach instead?

Any thoughts, advice or pointers would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks so much in advance!

2

It is still avaiable in devel:languages:R:released.
Also, consider running it in a distrobox.

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3

As this package fails to build for a long time, it got removed from Factory and Tumbleweed. The upstream codebase seems to depend on outdated libraries which are not longer available in Factory/Tumbleweed.
https://build.opensuse.org/requests/1269409

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4

https://forums.opensuse.org/t/how-to-install-rstudio-desktop/184125/11

Another option is to just install the official RStudio package from Posit.

5

Someone needs to do it:

759678  State:accepted   By:dimstar_suse When:2019-12-29T14:49:05
        Created by: dimstar_suse
        delete:                                                             openSUSE:Factory/rstudio
...
        Descr: Drop, has never been ported to recent boost versions; can be
               reintroduced once fixed

As you see, it is more than just “rebuild” which usually happens automatically when dependencies change.

1269409  State:accepted   By:dimstar_suse When:2025-05-02T12:57:57
        Created by: repo-checker
        delete:                                                             openSUSE:Factory/rstudio
...
        Descr: [botdel] Package has had build problems for >= 6 weeks

When a package fails to build for 6 weeks there is notification sent to the Factory list. Nobody responded, nobody stepped in to do the work so it got deleted. If

you are in the best position to do it.

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6

Thank you all for your thoughtful suggestions and generous responses. While programming and packaging are not my areas of expertise, RStudio is essential to my work, and I truly appreciate your guidance. I’ll do my best to get involved and contribute however I can.

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I am not entirely familiar with R studio, but I guess is R plus some IDE and plotting capabilities built in? If working with a terminal for running scripts, a separate editor for writing your programs, and image viewer for looking at your plots is acceptable then you could try building R from source. It is really is not a big deal and you will get used to it in no time.

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AFAICT RStudio released the version that fixed build with the current boost:

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9

I have found on another distro (gentoo) that you can install and run rstudio very simply. I assume this would work on openSUSE. I downloaded tarball from posit site:

rstudio-2025.05.0-496-x86_64-fedora.tar.gz

As user extract tar into a directory in your home directory. Run ~/home/xxxxx/rstudio_directory/rstudio. rstudio starts and finds R language installed on system.

Only successfully did a little math so far. Have not tested any elaborate functionality.

FYI. tom kosvic