I think what the GP means is that whitespace is often not ignored by LaTeX, so line breaks can cause extra wide spaces between words. It's common to comment out the line break in LaTeX for this reason. This is much less of an issue in Typst (if at all) due to the separation of code and content.

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/7453/what-is-the-use...

There can still be cases where a fourth run is necessary, theoretically a fifth run. There are even cases where you get into an infinite loop, for example if you use the vref package. It will "cleverly" replace references to things like "figure 3 on the next page" or "figure 3 on page 8". When the reference is expanded, it might cause the figure to move to the following page, which means the reference is then contracted to "on page 8", which means the figure moves back to the original place again, in which case the reference must be updated, and so on ...

LaTeX will usually tell you by including a warning in the output ("LaTeX Warning: Label(s) may have changed. Rerun to get cross-references right."), which no one reads, because it is so verbose. Not having that warning is not a guarantee that it's now stable either, so our Makefile actually compares the PDF files minus variable bytes like timestamps to know whether the build converged.

The term was arguably coined by RMS and his full statement was:

> “Free software” means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, “free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.”

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

Sometimes beer happens to be free, in which case it is referred to as "free beer". It's just an example.

LaTeX is not as stable as people make it out to be.

I don't know how many packages there are for working with tables, but 20 years ago, `tabu` was the most recommended package, until the maintainer stopped responding. Now the package is incompatible with almost everything else, leading to headaches when trying to compile old documents:

https://github.com/tabu-issues-for-future-maintainer/tabu

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/470107/incompatibili...

Typst at least has dependency pinning out of the box. If you value reproducibility, you should invent a similar mechanism for your LaTeX documents.

Also, I'm loosely following the activities around LaTeX on Github and Stackexchange and it seems that it's mostly maintained by three people or so (Carlisle, Mittelbach, Fischer), who - no offense - aren't getting any younger. I wonder how well LaTeX will be maintained if these long time contributors have to step down eventually.

Besides airplanes mentioned in the other comments, this is also common in airports. Zürich Airport gives you four hours for free.

Stuttgart Airport has 60 minutes.