Re: Problem with kpsewhich on a new instal

    Gosh! I can't believe that this would be necessary to move a TL-tree
    which should be a very desirable thing to have.

In general, you can cp -ar a TL installation tree to any directory, set
PATH to use it out of that directory, and it should work.  The basic
programs are all self-locating. Not sure about every third-party
program, or about Windows, but at least on Unix, core typesetting should
certainly work. I just tried it (cp -ar /tmp/foo /tmp/bar) and it worked
fine.

Thus I surmise the problem is with your particular paths containing your
various tildes, etc.

    What is the meaning of "portable" as an option to the installer?

It's described in the documentation, but admittedly it's not
all that obvious. Run install-tl --help or see the "instopt_portable"
option here:
https://tug.org/texlive/doc/install-tl.html#PROFILES

But I'll save you the trouble. This is how I described it:

  instopt_portable (default 0)

  Install for portable use, e.g., on a USB stick, without touching the
  host system. Specifically, this forces the user directories TEXMFHOME,
  TEXMFCONFIG, TEXMFVAR to be identical to the system directories
  TEXMFLOCAL, TEXMFSYSCONFIG, TEXMFSYSVAR, respectively (regardless of
  other options and environment variables).

  In addition, on Windows, it disables the desktop integration, path
  adjustment, and file associations actions usually performed.

If the portable option solves your problems, great. --best, karl.