Teaching stats with R, Quarto and git - Afraid of the technical hurdles

Hej there, we are teaching basic statistics in the social sciences using R, RStudio, RMarkdown/Quarto and git. In general this works quite well and the student's (most not used to programming before at all), enjoy our concept, although is more demanding than many others. Feedback is usually above other modules.

However, there are some pain points that really make the start very difficult for us and I would like to know if you have similar experiences or—even better—suggestions on how to resolve them.

1. Our students' are increasingly tablet or phone users with decreasing experience on how to use a keyboard or mouse (!). Writing pipes on the tablet is a paaain.

2. Setting up git get increasingly painful. When we started, gitlab used username/passwords, now they require 2FA and tokens. That's great in professional or semi-professional contexts, but here just using a username would be sufficient. Are there any alternatives that are just plain simple to use?

3. Making RStudio, git, and github play well together always creates chaos at the beginning of the semester. While it works like charm on some students' computers, it doesn't on others and requires a lot of time debugging (especially as some errors only appear at the first push or so). I can't even phrase it well, but getting everybody up in running takes quite some time and it is totally unpredictable.