[andenacitelli]

The installation and first five minutes of any kind of product is hugely make or break. I keep my resume in LaTeX via Overleaf, but probably wouldn’t bother with it if I had to get LaTeX running locally, which has always seemed fairly complex to me (though I’m admittedly no LaTeX has expert and may entirely be wrong).

[porcoda]

This surprises me. On most platforms it’s just a package download and install. On Mac, it’s macTeX. On Linux, it’s whatever your distro calls texlive via the package manager. On windows it’s mikTeX. That’s not exactly complex or requiring any sort of latex expertise. Linux can be the one that requires the most thinking if they don’t have one package that pulls in all of what you need, but I can’t remember it being more than a couple minutes of effort last time I did it on Ubuntu or fedora.

[grepLeigh]

The difficulty is getting multiple collaborators to install and pin the same packages, where everyone might be using a different platform/distro.

Example: I might commit a change that compiles perfectly fine with my version of asmath, but it conflicts with the version of asmath in the style guide of some UC Berkeley department/lab.

[mbreese]

It requires choices and knowing what to install and if things don’t work, troubleshooting the install can be difficult. For a first time task of “install latex”, it’s not the easiest. Especially for newer users. I e done it half a dozen times and I’m still not quite sure if I’ve done it right on my Mac (right away).

[tombert]

Fair enough. I just have a Nix Flake to handle this stuff for me now so I just do `nix build`, but obviously that's getting into territory that is super geeky.