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Re:A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R by YeGoblynQueenne on Thursday June 14, 2018 @05:15AM (#17310411)
Eh, that has always been the case for windows vs linux, that you don't have to compile anything yourself because there is always an installer that will deploy precompiled binaries for whatever you want to install (except for when there isn't, because nobody has compiled it for windows, at which point you're in deeper shit) (or except when something installs itself but doesn't update your envars, so you have to do it yourself, which kind of defeats the purpose of the whole "installer" thing).
Re:A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R by int_19h on Friday June 15, 2018 @03:59AM (#17318197)
You don't need to compile anything yourself on Linux either - that's what package managers are for.
Re:A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R by YeGoblynQueenne on Friday June 15, 2018 @05:55AM (#17318620)
Iiish. For small projects or when you want to get development versions etc that are not in a distro's repos it's pretty common to have to do a make-configure.

Then again, with Python in particular, I have often had errors either with pip-install, or after "successful" installation, for various reasons.

Re:A newcomer’s (angry) guide to R by int_19h on Friday June 15, 2018 @07:14PM (#17324517)
In this case, we were talking about Python itself. I don't see any particular reason why most people should need to build it themselves, whether on Windows or on Linux. Packages are another matter, but here the issue is the way Python itself is packaged on Ubuntu.