Will need to do more testing with the GitHub project you mentioned, but I can answer one of your questions right now about RStudio Desktop IDE: I've found that if the system R and the conda environment R are the same version (tested with 4.1.x) then you can run Rstudio Desktop inside a conda R environment with no special setup required as it seems that part of the system R and conda R is used when calling RStudio Desktop. New package installations are only done for the conda R.