Anaconda vs. miniconda

Question

In the Anaconda repository, there are two types of installers:

\"Anaconda installers\" and \"Miniconda installers\".

What

Answer 1

Anaconda is a very large installation ~ 2 GB and is most useful for those users who are not familiar with installing modules or packages with other package managers.

Anaconda seems to be promoting itself as the official package manager of Jupyter. It's not. Anaconda bundles Jupyter, R, python, and many packages with its installation.

Anaconda is not necessary for installing Jupyter Lab or the R kernel. There is plenty of information available elsewhere for installing Jupyter Lab or Notebooks. There is also plenty of information elsewhere for installing R studio. The following shows how to install the R kernel directly from R Studio:

To install the R kernel, without Anaconda, start R Studio. In the R terminal window enter these three commands:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("IRkernel/IRkernel")
IRkernel::installspec()

Done. The next time Jupyter is opened, the R kernel will be available and available.