On April 22, 2008, R 2.7.0 was released. The R Project for Statistical Computing is a statistical software package similar to SPSS, SAS, and S-Plus, but there is one difference: it is free (libre) and open source software. You can get it for free off the internet and you can do what you want with it, modify the source code, and redistribute it under the same license. Now it comes with antialiasing for X11 displays.
R is stable and mature, and can replace any of the above proprietary products that cost much money and have licenses that can impede useful work and scientific progress. I’ve seen this happen over and over for instance as a university student, where students must go to often crowded labs to use the software or bother with license keys that often expire after a set time. R on the other hand can be used anywhere for any purpose.
What’s New In 2.7.0?
This blog article was created solely for the purpose of explaining a new and exciting feature for Linux users. For displaying graphs in X (default), the display is now antialiased. In a nontechnical summary, this means the graphs look much better than they did before because they’re smooth. To see what I mean, view the two images in full size:
Then, an R 2.7.0 graph:
The first graph looks jagged and old fashioned, but still readable and perfectly adequate. The new graph is nice and smooth and beautiful. Of course, in earlier versions, R was able to output smooth-looking graphs if you outputted to PDF, but now if you’re running Linux the graphs are smooth if you want to display them on screen immediately, which was not the case before.
Other improvements can be found in the release notes.
Conclusion
The R Project has been for a while an awesome project that could easily replace proprietary products like S-Plus, and now it’s gotten just a bit better for Linux users. A big thank you to the developers of R for making such a wonderful package that allows mathematicians, scientists, and everyone else who needs a first-class statistical package, to use one that is free software.
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