TeX Live can also be configured to install the bare minimum TeX ecosystem (or just TeX+LaTeX), which only takes a few minutes to download and install but results in hunting down dependencies and manually installing them whenever you want to use a new package.

It also seems quite slow to update, and a recent (?) name change of `tools' to `latex-tools' seems to have broken multicol, which drove me to MikTeX. Internet connection required, but far less headache.