I'd recommend looking closely at the output in your R console, I suspect one of the error messages will tell you a system dependency was missing, with suggestions on how to install it depending on your OS (or not, if the package maintainer didn't add that). On Windows you never have to do this manually, which is why you get this error on Linux only. So the workflow is you go to a command line, install the missing system dependency(ies) and then try the installation in R again.
Now, there's a new tool out there to install packages on Linux without having to think about system dependencies, if I followed correctly: https://blog.rstudio.com/2020/07/01/announcing-public-package-manager/ (I haven't used it myself yet).
Regarding your question about the R version, unless ggpubr or one of its dependencies requires a minimal R version, you don't need to update. I myself am answering whilst updating R 