this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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I do NOT understand how zip is still the default. I use .tgz wherever I can.
Because of your comment, I did a quick google search and pretty much every source says that .tar.gz is also pretty ancient and not that good (from a compression point of view). For better compression, you can use the xz or 7zip formats. The former is more used on Linux, if that's what you're using.
Lzo or lzma is best for compression. Also depends on the compression rate. KDE Ark is awesome
Nono, z-standard is where it's at
Compatibility with literally anything under the sun that can decompress a compressed file.
But isn't that's given with tgz too?
Except of course Windows iirc
Yep, but Windows is still the majority right now... And i'm sure there are a lot of people out there that don't have 7zip installed (why doesn't MS include their own implementation already ?)
And this is the problem imo. If you NEVER change a thing you will never improve
Good luck teaching that to people who only use a computer to browse Facebook.
Not saying it's impossible, but it takes time
Do these even need zips?
They do but its useless. Winrar can handle .tar.* too
Windows, Android, iOS do not open them by default.
You can do it on iOS using Siri Shortcuts.
I don't get how they add all these formats to Shortcuts but only Zip into the file app...
People barely understand how to open a
.zipfile, explaining what.tar.gzis and why you need an additional program (on Windows) is going to be impossible.What exactly is better about tar.gz over zip?
I tend to prefer zip because of cross compatibility with Windows with no extra software needed, and because the Windows software to unpackage a tar.gz that I have used required unpacking it twice (once for the gz, then again for the tar). It seemed like a hassle.
On Linux I command line everything, so they are the same to me, so I have no preference there. But is there something actually better about it?
With .zip you can extract just one file from it, while with .tar.gz you have to uncompress the whole .tar before you can get the files - so that's worse.
But, since you're compressing all files at once you could get better compression since information can be shared between files.