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.

You could be interested in Pop!_OS, also. It is Ubuntu (and hence Debian) based.

Yes it does but it will be outdated and stable.

I recommend Fedora even though I have never used R personality. Another option is to use distrobox with podman in order to run any distro

I would use Linux mint as its Ubuntu based and is user friendly. Python and R should both be in the repos.