and then 90 seconds later you'll find yourself running `sudo apt-get texlive-full` because some mysterious font somewhere is wedging up the gears and it's not worth sorting out.
Yeah, fair enough. On MacTeX or texlive on Arch, it usually takes me a few iterations of `tlmgr install` runs before I have everything I need. "collection-fontsrecommended" is usually the (meta) package I install these days.
I wish texlive would move to rolling updates, or at-least make distribution upgrades easier.
You can install a small base which comes in ~150mb, then add packages as you need.