@lodurel Indeed, I guess I was just questioning the current utility of installing texlive in the first place. Personally the software package has becnisl large that I've chosen to delegate its installation and usage to a third party "in the cloud". Admittedly, I have not yet had to write something as extensive as a PhD thesis, so my situation is different. If I were to do a PhD, I probably would need to have a local installation, and I'd probably not uninstall it until I have to change PCs (and reinstall the OS with it)
@ayhon as hinted in my message, my LaTeX install is mostly a remnant of my PhD. It certainly was very useful to typeset a larger document like my thesis. My brother had to do the same in a field where LaTeX is not used, and it was awful, featuring me writing programs to manipulate his doc file to fixup basic stuff like the glossary.
These days I still use LaTeX when I want to typeset a beautiful document, like a letter