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Comment by jimhefferon | Hacker News Reader

> getting a LaTeX environment up and running is still quite a hassle today

People often say that. I find that assertion puzzling. I use LaTeX for hours everyday, so I think I exercise a lot of the functionality, but to install I just follow the brief directions on the TeX Live site (I don't use MiKTeX but I understand it to also install smoothly). Could I ask what part of the installation gives trouble?

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When it comes to LaTex I decide the environment (OS / LaTeX distro) by which editor is supported. So far I still find 'Kile' the best editor by far. Which is why I have a Kubuntu VM just for that purpose. For the templates that I use there's a whole host of packages that I need - and the package names of course don't match in apt-get and in LaTex, so it basically becomes a 'guess what error message means which package is missing / try to google for all that' until everything runs. I don't know about you, but I don't call that smooth.

Personally, I just get everything. That is, I'd get the whole MacTeX distribution. Never need to worry too much then. (At least on Ubuntu, the stuff from apt-get is often years old, which doesn't matter sometimes, but does matter often enough to be annoying, in my experience.)

As I wrote - I don't use MacTeX because I like Kile. On Ubuntu so far I haven't found an apt-get package that contains really 'everything'.

Is there anything missing from 'apt-get install texlive-full'?

FWIW I like texworks and texstudio for "Visual" editing due to the side-by-side display of LaTeX and PDF (and using SyncTeX to jump between them). Other than that I mostly use Vim to edit LaTeX.

I think texstudio is fairly similar to Kile you might want to give it a shot.

The biggest problem I usually have (on a Mac) isn't so much that it's difficult; it's that the MacTeX package is 2.4 GB, which often means an hour or so of waiting before I can actually do anything.

True but of course you don't have to do that every day.

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