Installing R Properly on Ubuntu Introduction There are a lot of ‘wrong’ ways to install R. Usually the result is a system on which R does not update (e.g. installed from source), does not update as fast as upstream (e.g. installed from package manager in Debian or Ubuntu), or requires additional tools (e.g. Bioconda). These aren’t necessarily wrong, and you may need to do these at times (e.g. if you write R packages that are on CRAN, then you may need to test on a dev version, which may need to be built from source), but there is a way that is better in most cases.