[wplug] LaTeX?

[Brandon Kuczenski]

I thought I would do what probably millions of other people have done - 
install LaTeX and use it for all my document-preparing needs.

So why the hell is it so hard?  The only Linux-friendly distributions of
LaTeX I can find are ftp archives with zero documentation (e.g.  
ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/ ) Whatever happened to
tar-balls and readme files? 

So I'll ask you guys: Where/how do I get LaTeX? I've already installed a
TeX implementation (teTeX) and I'm actually a little uncertain exactly
what LaTeX gets me beyond that, nor have I found any concise answers.  
For such a widely-used program, the documentation is simply awful.

uh, little help?

-Brandon