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Comment by Evidlo | Hacker News Reader

Currently using this to build my Master's thesis. It's nice because it detects all the packages used in the tex source and downloads them automatically.

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What do you need that isn't there already with TeXLive? I haven't downloaded a package in many years, despite many reinstalls and a lot of varied Latex use.

You are not having any issues because TeXLive is everything. The `full` scheme on `install-sh` or `texlive-full` on Debian takes up around 7 GB last time I looked, 2 to 3 of which are PDFs for package documentation.

That is, by a long shot, the largest install a lot of people have on their system. Nowadays, no biggie, but systems like Miktex allow to install-on-demand and of course, it allows you to shrink your installation significantly.

Full TexLive contains a number of packages average "Western hemisphere scientific authors", arguably the largest LaTeX demographic, will never need: Eastern and other languages, music, humanities.

You don't need to install the bits you don't want though, like languages you don't know, documentation (online is easier), music, and humanities. My installs are a bit over 2GB, which seems comparable to a minimal Android Studio install (and a maximal TeXLive install is much less than a large Android development install, if I'm reading things right), and full TeXLive is less than full Qt.

I use the installer from TeXLive itself rather than the distro packages, as you have more control that way. Not only that, you can share everything but binaries between multiple OSes, like Windows and Linux (via WSL).

That means spending time to figure out what you don't need. It's far better to just spend those extra 5 gigs than waste time on this.

Your time must be pretty valuable! It only takes a minute or two, as it's pretty clear which of the ~30 things to deselect.

Unless you deselect too many, in which case you have to go back and try again until you have all the packages you used. It's not much time, but it counts to me.

You don't play very many new games do you?

Being on HN and talking about TeXLive, I was thinking in terms of Linux, for which those 90GB blockbuster games don't exist (?). So I did a mental jump there, because to me TeXLive is the "native" Linux TeX distribution, and Miktex the "native" Windows distribution.

> I was thinking in terms of Linux, for which those 90GB blockbuster games don't exist (?)

https://www.protondb.com/

TeXLive has to me been the obvious choice on Windows for years. Miktex always seemed to be fussy and missing things the few times I tried to use it.

I also switched to TeXLive on Windows recently, because lualatex runs significantly faster there.

XCom 2 runs natively on Linux (Thanks Feral!). Needs > 70GB of disk space with all extensions installed.

I use inotify-wait + tectonic + a PDF viewer instead of a TeX editing tool.

Simple and I can use my own editor.

That sounds like an absolute nightmare.

texliveonfly can do this, too.

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