By William Jeffrey Rankin, Sat Mar 22 2025
I recently upgraded my TeX Live installation from 2024 to 2025. My method differs slightly from the upgrade instructions on the TeX Live web site, but I've had no issues doing it this way the past few years. Rather than copying the installation to a new directory, I simply move it (I have limited space on my Linux VM and the TeX Live install is nearly 12 gigabytes). To start:
cd /usr/local/texlive
sudo mv 2024 2025
Next, modify paths to reflect the location of TeX Live to /usr/local/2025. For me, this means modifying my .bashrc and using visudo to update the path for sudoers.
Now, download the update-tlmgr-latest.sh script provided on the upgrade instructions page, make it executable, and run it.
Finally, upgrade as usual using sudo tlmgr update --list and sudo tlmgr update --all. That's it, you're done!