What are the advantages of TeX Live over MiKTeX?
(Not meant to be a complete answer, just an addition to others.)
TeX Live provides more secure defaults than MiKTeX and probably pays more attention to security in general. For example, section 3 of this paper describes a simple way to make document (or bibtex database, or package) viruses which would almost make MS-Word look as secure alternative ;-) This attack doesn't work with TeX Live's default settings, regardless of the platform (Windows or other).
Not completely unrelated, TeX Live is designed to support multi-user systems, including being installed on a servers and used on network clients, possibly with mixed architectures and OSes. (Which may be totally irrelevant to the OP, but mentioned only for information.)
I've covered some of this before on my blog, so some of this is a rehash! In recent versions, the differences between MiKTeX and TeX Live have narrowed. Package coverage between the two is similar, as is the ability to do on-line updates. I guess here you want differences:
Only MiKTeX can do 'on the fly' package installation, as TeX Live is more focussed on having a system that works well on multi-user systems.
TeX Live defaults to installing everything, which means that if you want everything it's (marginally) easier to use TeX Live than MiKTeX. (MiKTeX has different installers, one of which installs everything, whereas for TeX Live you have one installer and make the choices within in.)
For most users, it's largely down to 'personal opinion' or 'what you try first'!
The main advantages which led me to TeXLive are:
- That it is maintained by TUG, that is, by more than one person, which makes it more future-safe.
- It supports many platforms, not just Windows. (The first paragraph of http://www.ctan.org/starter.html needs an update.) I am interested in Linux-x86 and Windows, so I made a portable installation covering both platforms on an external hard disk.
- Its real-time updates of packages: once updated on CTAN and propagated to the mirrors overnight, new package versions are also available in the package manager (tlmgr).
- faster compilation (especially in case of graphics files)
EDIT:
As for speed (4.), I measured compilation times of the animate package documentation which embeds about 260 Metapost graphics files and a few (3) small bitmaps. I used the Windows Powershell command measure-command {<programm> <prog args>} for the time measurements, and tested TeXLive2010 and MiKTeX-2.8 (the latest version I used before leaving for TeXLive) on a [email protected] Ghz.
TeXLive:
latex animate 45.044 s
dvips animate 10.642 s
MiKTeX:
latex animate 2 min, 53.270 s
dvips animate 48.492 s