Debian (and most other distros) will have what you need, my lab runs Ubuntu and most of our statistics are in Python and R, except for the people who still use SPSS. What I tend to do is start up docker containers for them to access rstudio from a browser, but renv would be the other way to go if you want versioned packages. Either way, you’ll have the same access to the packages you need.
I’d love for a Game Master mode like in D:OS2.