compatibility of Rstudio on older Mac OS

I'm working on an old Mac Air where Monterey Mac OS X 12 is the latest system it can support. I was working with the Rstudio (an old version that I hadn't upgraded since I learned that the newer versions required newer OS's) and today I had a warning that the graphics were disabled because of some incompatibility with R. I just upgrade to R 4.6 last week. So I went to the Rstudio download page and uploaded a version that it said was compatible with Monterey but when I open Rstudio, I get get the following error message/problem report

R Session Startup Failure Report

RStudio Version

RStudio 2024.09.1+394 "Cranberry Hibiscus " (a1fe401f, 2024-11-02) for macOS

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) RStudio/2024.09.1+394 Chrome/124.0.6367.243 Electron/30.4.0 Safari/537.36

Error message

[No error available]

Process Output

The R session exited with code 1.

Error output:

dyld[5650]: missing symbol called

Standard output:

[No output emitted]

Logs

/Users/ken/.local/share/rstudio/log/rsession-ken.1.log

2026-04-22T09:35:44.386639Z [rsession-ken] ERROR Unexpected exception: boost: mutex lock failed in pthread_mutex_lock: Invalid argument [generic:22]; LOGGED FROM: void rstudio::core::(anonymous namespace)::LockRegistration::refreshLocks() src/cpp/core/file_lock/LinkBasedFileLock.cpp:252
2026-04-22T09:35:44.386639Z [rsession-ken] ERROR Unexpected exception: boost: mutex lock failed in pthread_mutex_lock: Invalid argument [generic:22]; LOGGED FROM: void rstudio::core::(anonymous namespace)::LockRegistration::refreshLocks() src/cpp/core/file_lock/LinkBasedFileLock.cpp:252

additional information on my R version, if of interest:

sessionInfo()
R version 4.6.0 (2026-04-24)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin20
Running under: macOS Monterey 12.7.6

Matrix products: default
BLAS: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.6-x86_64/Resources/lib/libRblas.0.dylib
LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/4.6-x86_64/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib; LAPACK version 3.12.1

locale:
[1] en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8

time zone: Europe/Paris
tzcode source: internal

attached base packages:
[1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] compiler_4.6.0

capabilities()
jpeg png tiff tcltk X11 aqua http/ftp sockets
TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE
libxml fifo cledit iconv NLS Rprof profmem cairo
FALSE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE TRUE
ICU long.double libcurl
TRUE TRUE TRUE
Thank you for any help that you can provide to get Rstudio up and running again for me.

Ken

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Does resetting RStudio's state help?

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For R 4.6 you'd need RStudio >= 2026.04 (changelog, related pr), try downgrading R to 4.4.
You can check version compatibility here:

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