[Symbiote]

> If it’s slow on LTE in Silicon Valley, it’s slow in Africa.

No, "Africa" is far too huge and varied to generalize about like that. Plenty of African countries have reasonable mobile infrastructure, and low enough costs.

  $ apt install lyx
  …
  Need to get 216 MB of archives.

(This is coming from nothing, LaTeX isn't installed.) At 5Mb/s, that's about 6 minutes. That's not unreasonable for a one-off installation, especially in a country where these speeds are normal. (And 5Mb/s is slow: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index .)

[yorwba]

The more likely hurdle is that it doesn't run on low-end smartphones (or maybe it does?) I know a Chinese university student who writes homework reports using Microsoft Word for Android because she can't afford another computer in addition to her phone. The situation in most African countries is probably not much better.