I have confirmed that install.packages("curl") fails on R started by a non-root user (vscode) on an image built from devcontainer.json as shown below.

{
	"image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/base:debian",
	"features": {
		"ghcr.io/rocker-org/devcontainer-features/r-apt:0": {
			"installBspm": true
		}
	}
}

This setup corresponds to the following script run with INSTALLBSPM=true.
https://github.com/rocker-org/devcontainer-features/blob/583387a2831c181905c571b306f3a976affbe5cb/src/r-apt/install.sh

Perhaps the script contains improper settings somewhere?

Originally posted by @eitsupi in #169 (comment)