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Comment by knolan | Hacker News Reader

A lot of our students use Overleaf, I’ve never seen the point; especially now that most of their thesis documents no longer compile on the free tier.

I suggested one my students simply install LaTeX and he went down some Docker rabbit hole a fellow class mate sent him. Students do love to over complicate things.

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Docker sounds about right for Latex given its gazillion dependencies with multiple alternatives and choices for several of those. I haven't really needed or used it in many years but it always was a bit of a beast to install. Early Linux in the nineties of course came with convenient package management that somewhat hides this. But dealing with e.g. windows or mac setups exposes a bit more that it's quite a bit of cruft that is getting installed.

Installing texlive is not hard; never used Docker.

https://tug.org/texlive/

The macOS installer is very easy to use and you can even install a basic version that installs the main latex packages you need (91MB). If you need to install more than the basic ones there is a package manager UI for that (TeX Live utility). Of course I just install the full version and I have everything. It is 5.7GB download.

I prefer to run LaTeX locally, but when I need to write something with more people I use Overleaf, as it allow to edit collaboratively. They are not excluding as you can use Git to push and pull changes.

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