Re: The most Tex friendly distribution?

["Thomas A. Schmitz" <thomas.schmitz@uni-bonn.de>]

On Sep 15, 2008, at 7:31 PM, Matija Šuklje wrote:

> Dne ponedeljek 15. septembra 2008 je Martin Schröder napisal(a):
>> 2008/9/15 Armando Martins <cidadaum@sapo.pt>:
>>> Any idea about the most Tex-friendly Linux distribution, please?
>>
>> Debian. The maintainer (Norbert Preining) actually visits TeX
>> conferences and was in Bohinj. :-)
>
> I use Gentoo and am pretty happy with the modular TeX Live ebuilds,  
> but on top
> of my head, I'd also say Debian would probably be (alongside  
> Slackware and
> Gentoo) one of the distros with the biggest TeX userbase.
>

If bandwith is an issue (i.e. if you're on a slow connection), modular  
builds are important. If you have a need for religious service and are  
convinced locusts and floods will ensue if you install something  
without using the official (TM) authentic (TM) package manager of your  
distribution, by all means, choose your distribution very carefully.  
But if these points aren't important to you, please just use the  
TeXLive installer on ANY linux distribution and install. TeXLive now  
has a wonderful tlmgr program which will help you keep up to date;  
this will probably be much faster than any packaging system (with the  
possible exception of Debian, unless Norbert is stuck in the mountains  
without internet access...) SuSE 10.X used to have a habit of setting  
certain environment variables (such as $TEXINPUTS) without bothering  
to tell the user about it; I think this is no longer the case in 11.0.  
I really didn't mean to say that the problems you reported a while ago  
were connected to your linux distribution. The most important piece of  
advice I can give: please please please install just one TeX system  
and STICK WITH IT. Either TeXLive or the TeX system offered by your  
distribution or the ConTeXt minimals - but not all of them; that would  
be fine for an advanced user but needlessly confusing for a beginner.

Thomas
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