• itisileclerk@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    10 hours ago

    Kudos to the developers, hats off, but why does anyone use WinRAR today? WinRAR was a lifesaver when large files needed to be compressed and split into 1.2 or 1.44 MB pieces so they could be transported on several floppy disks.

    • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      9 hours ago

      I never did that in that era for some reason, maybe bc CD burning got there fast enough for me? The only program I used to compress and split files was pkzip

      • YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        6 hours ago

        In the days of Napster, when it took like 30 minutes to download a ~4mb mp3, and before thumb drives and cd burning was a thing, it was a life saver when you got a new computer. Took hours to transfer over all your songs, but at least you didn’t have to redownload and pray no one picked up the phone again.

  • Miller@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    11 hours ago

    This feels like when that fish was discovered that was thought to have been extinct for millions of years.

    • recursivethinking@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      26 minutes ago

      The problem is that its multipart format is extremely widespread for certain purposes, and 7z fails to properly unpack those formats. So I find myself having to use it on wine. I try to avoid those situations and I literally never use it to create an archive nor is it my default unpacker but I can’t seem to be rid of it.

      It insists on itself.

    • WolvenSpectre@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      15
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      14 hours ago

      While both are Archive Programs, WinRAR does a bunch of things that 7Zip does not and some things 7Zip does better, as 7Zip does a couple of things that WinRAR doesn’t and a few things that WinRAR doesn’t do as well as 7Zip.

      Also depending on what you are archiving WinRAR does it better for various things, where 7Zip tends to work better at Raw Data and certain Data Structures.

      • MrKoyun@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 hour ago

        I really dont think there are that many people out there who are going out and making consciously decided choices between winrar and 7zip based on stuff like this

    • Tibi@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      18
      ·
      15 hours ago

      I found one explanation in that winrar is developed by germans and 7zip by a russian guy. Maybe some people dont want to support russian stuff? But thats pretty far fetched imo…

      • Delilah (She/Her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        11 hours ago

        tar doesn’t even provide compression. Which may be what you want. If you have a weak CPU and a big storage device why would you waste the cpu cycles? I know I’ve removed the compression step in AUR builds for example. But if you don’t know what it does, maybe an all in one solution like 7zip or winrar might be a more attractive prospect.

        • bus_factor@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          8 hours ago

          The tar format doesn’t, but the tar command has command line flags for a number of compression algorithms, and if your algorithm of choice doesn’t have a flag, you can just pipe it to the compression program.

        • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          11 hours ago

          Compressed tars suck anyway since you need to decompress them in order to get the list of files inside, unlike in any other sane archive format.

          • tal@lemmy.today
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            edit-2
            3 hours ago

            The pixz compressor provides parallized compression/decompression (desirable on modern CPUs), uses LZMA (like 7zip or xz), and provides indexed access when used as tar's compressor. The last of these is what you want.

            https://github.com/vasi/pixz

            $ tar cvf foo.tar.pixz -Ipixz foo/
            

            pixz is packaged in Debian-family distros.

          • bus_factor@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            8 hours ago

            I very rarely list the content of compressed files, so that doesn’t bother me much.

            Back in the day the trick to get better compression on zip files was to first make an uncompressed zip file, and then put that in a compressed zip file. tar did that all by itself!

            • deadcream@sopuli.xyz
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              8 hours ago

              I mean that’s what GUI archivers do when you open the file.

              So tar is only useful for some kind of automatic workflows where archives are processed automatically. Like what package managers do.

              • bus_factor@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                6 hours ago

                The only thing I’ve done with a GUI archiver for the past 20+ years is right click on a file and select “extract to here”. But more commonly I just extract things on the command line, without any automatic processing.

    • lokalhorst@feddit.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      15 hours ago

      Maybe enterprise support? It know this is important for many companies or governmental agencies.

  • mertn@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    14 hours ago

    I just use file systems that compress behind the scenes. Over the wires I might use a -z option if I am in a hurry.