What I imagine when I run
"sudo apt install texlive-full"
on my old, shitty laptop...

Has is become that bloated? I ran it on my Atari ST with a fucking 68000 at 8 MHz and 4 MB RAM. Note the M in both cases, that's mega, not giga.

@Fast-Nop I think he's referring to the size of the install. It's a multi-GB package, it takes forever to download and install

@endor My harddisk (the whole) back then was 50 MB. Again an M.

@Fast-Nop a quick search says that the texlive-full package is 5-6GB nowadays.

I can't even imagine what it needs all that space for tbh

@endor Holy shit. If they hadn't decided to bloat it, we could have browsers that actually could do nice text layout by using the TeX engine. Today's PCs and even smartphones would be fast enough to do instantaneously what an 8 MHz 68k took quite some time for.

@Fast-Nop indeed :(

Just to confirm this, I tried running 'apt install texlive-full' on my server:

"0 upgraded, 412 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Need to get 2,506 MB of archives.

After this operation, 4,809 MB of additional disk space will be used."

To be fair, this is *all* the packages in existance - most of which you'll never need for 99.9% of cases.

A minimal install is about 300-400MB, but it often reaches ~1-2GB once you need some extras, like science-related stuff.

Still annoying though

@Fast-Nop and that is why the industry hasn’t produced any game changing things in the last decade or so... the last big game changer was the smartphone or tablet... since then it’s all just bloated software on top of bloated software.. causing more-powerful hardware to need to be used just to run things that 20 years ago systems did just fine .

Until we break this notion of bloat code from over abstraction and run time interpretation languages rather than runing on the damn hardware directly... we will be in this constant struggle race between trying to keep the hardware up with the software rather than the other way around!!!!!

It will take either a disaster, financially, or technically to put us back on the correct path, OR a company with a vision to change and prove why the current path we are on is bad

@QuanticoCEO Torvalds didn't even want C++ for Git although that is clearly userspace. He argued that C would keep C++ programmers away because he wanted devs who understood the machine on raw byte level so that Git would be fast.

LaTeX web editors like Overleaf exists for a reason.

https://www.overleaf.com/