docker-texlive-thin VS dockerfiles

I recently wrote a few documents in latex after ignoring it for over a decade. Trying to get a working setup with latex + bibtex + a few custom styles was quite annoying. I can appreciate that people who just want to author a document with some equations in latex but who are not programmers or avid command line users might find the entire experience of getting a tolerable latex workflow set up very challenging. I guess that might be partly why https://www.overleaf.com/ has a business model! Hide all the package management and command line tooling nonsense behind a simple web interface.

I was very excited to find Thomas Weise had wrangled latex and a Tex Live installation into a docker container: https://github.com/thomasWeise/docker-texlive-thin

Another useful tool is latexmk, which is already installed inside the docker-texlive-thin container : https://mg.readthedocs.io/latexmk.html

By containing the madness of latex tooling and package management with docker and some volume mounts, I could have a reasonably sane build process to manufacture PDFs from latex source files.

I don't recommend md2blog add mandatory dependencies on anything related to latex. Another way to think about it might be offering optional latex support through some plugin mechanism that doesn't know anything about latex. But that path sure won't produce anything resembling a "zero config" static site generator.

https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk... is the one I remember, a bit old but still useful to see how she does it.

Seems super painful and indirected for a nebulous gain to me, but find your joy however you want I guess

Jess does some awesome stuff and this is literally what you asked for. hollywood

mildly relevant https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desktop/

Some of my day-to-day software.

After knowing that saved Chrome passwords and cookies in Linux are not protected against malicious dependencies in our development environment or other apps in our system, I decided to run my core apps in Docker containers, where their data is not accessible without sudo, and a personal understanding of where stuff is being saved.

These docker containers are also an improved version of https://github.com/jessfraz/dockerfiles/

Contrary to the project above, docker-workspaces runs Chrome in a sandbox, encrypts keys with the help of an also dockerized gnome-keychain, and works in tandem with pulseaudio, so you can use wired headphones (i still need to add some dependencies for it to work with bluetooth headphones).

Thank you. As someone who uses containers a lot (even to run local programs, shout out to https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/docker-containers-on-the-desk...) this makes some sense to me.

I'm a little way into the Nix Pills document (https://nixos.org/guides/nix-pills/why-you-should-give-it-a-...) which seems to start the explanation from a place where I can understand.