Yes, an overwhelming majority use LaTeX rather than TeX directly. (Well, among the tiny number of people who use TeX/LaTeX at all.) The reason, though, is not t

Yes, an overwhelming majority use LaTeX rather than TeX directly. (Well, among the tiny number of people who use TeX/LaTeX at all.) The reason, though, is not that TeX is difficult to use: it's that TeX is a system for typesetting, and most people don't need typesetting. If you're writing a paper for publication in a journal, they probably have their own typesetting style. With LaTeX you can just specify your paper as a sequence of paragraphs, "sections", a title, an author, and so on, and, by including the journal's style file (assuming it's good), your paper will come out typeset in that journal's style. This philosophy is explained at https://www.latex-project.org/about/ https://www.latex-project.org/about/ This is great for certain (many) kinds of documents. The problem with this, though, is that the moment you want to change the appearance and get into typesetting yourself, you're fighting a system that was actively designed to prevent you from doing this. An analogy may be a system like, say, WordPress: if what you have is a blog, then it would work for you, and you even get to choose one of several “themes” that others have written, and so on. The set of available plugins and customizations can even be impressively versatile (for example, I noticed that time.com runs on WordPress, and apparently so do a number of other non-blog sites: https://vip.wordpress.com/clients/ https://vip.wordpress.com/clients/). But ultimately, if you're trying to figure it out by yourself and have your own ideas about what your website should look like, a system like this will always be more frustrating than the alternative (of having full control). TeX is not difficult to use, though in the beginning you'd have to specify manually things like the typesetting of the document title (put it in a bold font at 16pt, centered on a line...). LaTeX has features to automate many such common typesettings tasks, but it has its own flaws (some stemming from the fact that it's implemented using TeX macros, which weren't designed for such heavy “programming”).