On Linux, RStudio uses the version of R pointed to by the output of the following command:
which R
The which command performs a search for the R executable using the system PATH. RStudio will therefore by default bind to the same version that is run when R is executed from a terminal.
For versions of R installed by system package managers (e.g. r-base on Debian or Ubuntu) this will be/usr/bin/R. For versions of R installed from source this will typically (but not always) be/usr/local/bin/R.
If RStudio is unable to locate R using which R, it will fall back to scanning explicitly for the R script in the/usr/local/bin and /usr/bin directories.
If you want to override which version of R is used then you can set the RSTUDIO_WHICH_R environment variable to the R executable that you want to run against. For example:
export RSTUDIO_WHICH_R=/usr/local/bin/R
Not that in order for RStudio to see