Installing R in Anaconda is taking forever

Question

For some reason I had to uninstall Anaconda and reinstall. I am trying to install R again, but its taking forever. I started that in the morning (10 am) and it still says installing R (5 pm). I am not using Anaconda prompt but Anaconda Navigator. I have successfully done this before and it didn't take this much time the last time I did it. What do you guys think is the problem?

Answer 1

The Anaconda base env is a massive environment with many packages installed by default. Similarly, metapackages like r-essentials involve installing many packages and sometimes it can be difficult to resolve a common denominator where none of the dependencies are in conflict. The easier path is to create the R env as a separate environment, rather than trying to install it in base.