This is in reply to Pavel Sanda's query about Texlive vs. Miktex.
Sorry, on my Fedora 28 system the "Reply to" button on the Mail Archive
does not seem to work. I get a blank screen on both Chrome and
Firefox. I may well be doing something wrong...
Anyway, I owe great thanks to the LyX team for your terrific ongoing
work. I've been using LyX for almost 10 years now and I can't imagine
life without it.
I've been mostly using Texlive on Linux for my own work; this has been
seamless at both install and run time. However, about 5 years ago I
helped a colleague install LyX on his Windows system using the "Bundle"
installer and thus with MikTex. This worked OK on the whole, but there
have been a few mysterious failures, especially when installing new
versions of LyX, even if the "simple" installer was used with an
existing Miktex installation. Problems were usually cleared up by a
complete reinstall of both MikTex and LyX, but that's quite a bother.
A couple of years ago this had became enough of an annoyance that we
decided to try a full Texlive installation on Windows after completely
removing Miktex. Lyx immediately detected Texlive and ran flawlessly.
This good experience has been repeated without exception since then,
through a number of version upgrades of LyX. We would not consider a
return to Miktex.
This experience left us wondering: why the emphasis on MikTex as opposed
to Texlive? The difference in installation simplicity and stability
seemed so striking to us. We do realize that Mixtex has certain
automatic convenience features that permit somewhat smaller installs,
saving perhaps 2-3 GB of disk space while automatically loading any
needed packages. However, this space saving would be modest on most
reasonably modern computers although it is clear that older machines
might benefit from Miktex's smaller footprint.
It is true that the need to install Texlive and LyX separately might be
a bit more difficult for the uninitiated, but a person would have to be
able to do one installation anyway with the bundle installer and seems
to have a much greater chance of running into trouble that way. This
strikes me as not being a good tradeoff in user friendliness.
If Miktex compatibility is to be maintained as an official part of LyX,
I STRONGLY support the proposal to include a warning to the user that
their Miktex installation might be modified or harmed by the installer.
In particular, I think failure to do so is more likely to mess up naive
users that sophisticated ones. Experienced people can get themselves out
of trouble. In fact, I'd be surprised if a substantial fraction of LyX
users are all that naive, since to use LyX effectively one must know at
least the basics of Latex (I've learned a lot this way - thanks!). Latex
is not for beginners.
Sorry to be so long-winded, but I wanted to cover all these points.
Thanks to Riki for wading in to the Windows installer mire.
Eric Barkan
