Dear R community,
I'm not sure this is the right place to put this in, but here we go:
Since a few weeks I'm having trouble using R Studio, which is related to the network and computer settings of my university, but I'm a bit disappointed I can't overrule this in R Studio. At my university everything is saved to a synchronisation drive called U:, and since three weeks the synchronisation with my computer is not working properly, therefore I can't open or save scripts or plots and so on. But this is not the main problem, as I can save those things somewhere else, the main problem is the R library. When installing R and R Studio, I can't choose where the libraries are installed, and even later I can't change this anywhere in R Studio. The basic R library is saved locally on C:, but everything I'm downloading myself goes to another library, which is in my case automatically set to some space that is synchronised on the U-drive. Apparently it depends on the Windows homepath settings on the computer. And although a colleague of mine was able to set up a new library directory to the local C:-drive, it was not possible to delete or overrule the old one (U:) without administrator rights, and when I try to install a package, although I can select it to go to the new C:-library, it doesn't really work, it still tries to install it to the old one. I totally blame the university IT for this problem, while the university IT blames the R software for not being capable of dealing with big university systems (they have no clue about R at all), and so I'm in some kind of unproductive stand-off since three weeks, and now the IT will finally re-install the entire system on the computer and hopefully this will solve the problems.
However, I'm not writing here to get a solution proposed for my specific problem, I just wish to suggest to the R Studio developers to adapt R Studio in a way that the user can change where the library is set. I'm really frustrated by now about the discussions with the university IT, and as I said, I'm a bit disappointed that I can't overrule the University settings with the power of R Studio on my own. And the way of checking and understanding and changing the library settings is rather user-unfriendly for non-R-users like the university IT, and they're not willing to spend a lot of time with this. Although I would not rule out that my university might be the only one not capable of dealing with R, maybe this issue could be addressed in a future release version? I really really appreciate using R Studio and wished more people would understand its benefits, thus I think it's important that also non-R-experienced IT people can easily deal with it.
Thanks for reading this.
Kind regards