Thanks for the comment. The point about MiKTeX and non-admin installation is to do with auto-installation. With MiKTeX, if you ask for a package in your source and it is not installed, MiKTeX will try to download and install it automatically. That makes it easy to have a small installation, and let the package manager find “extras” as needed. However, in the past if you had a MiKTeX installation in, say, C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.x, and you are not the administrator, then things will fail as you (probably) can’t write to the installation folder. With the latest version, MiKTeX will instead install the package just for the current user, so everything works. Of course, there will be more disk usage if several users install the same package, but there is always a pay-off!

Joseph

and first of all thanks for your blog, full of interesting information. I often have to give advice about installing TeX (sometimes on windows) and I found your comparison betwenn the two challengers very interesting (I must admit I lost track of MikTeX development recently and didn’t know they are including TeXworks too, which is very good news).

You say: “you can use the auto-install system without needing to be the Administrator.” I’m under the impression it is also possible with TeX Live (though I never did it myself on windows). I also think TeX Live does provide user-specific texmf directories, such as TEXMFHOME (default: ~/texmf of %USERPROFILE%/texmf). Maybe I misunderstood your point?