I have some concerns about adding the links to the compiler and latex installer pages. For the most part people should be getting those through their system package manager not installing "by hand". I worry the intersection of people who need use to give them the links to the compiler download pages and people who will be able to reliable get those to work (I have no faith I could quickly get a user-space install compiler to work) is small to non-existent so by adding this we are going to accidentally send people down very frustrating rabbit holes.

From a Linux perspective: for sure. It is better to install from a package manager (I think most download pages actually says so as well).

From a Windows perspective: I am not so sure that people really know how to get a compiler up and running in a convenient way. I know on my previous laptop I had three Python versions and at least three compilers available, all in different shells, so getting a single shell where I could build C/C++ for Python was at least a bit challenging. Also, the Build Tools for Visual Studio are probably worth pointing out as they most likely are not that well known and probably the easiest way to get something up and running on Windows (mingw/cygwin clearly more complicated).

Maybe it is better to make specific Windows setup instructions then?

(For LaTeX it is not links to download pages, just two example packages, similar to Inkscape et al, which also should not be installed like that. Worth noting is that Graphviz on the following line actually points to the download page, which probably should be changed then.)

@tacaswell, are you still semi-blocking on this? We already link to compilers and latex packages, so are you advocating removing those, or not updating them? Note this is the developer instructions, so we are allowed to assume some sophistication.

I still have some concerns but not enough to block the consensus, merging.