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WinRAR releases new update and says it’s thanks to people finally paying (www.dexerto.com)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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[–] 21 points 4 months ago (3 children)

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.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    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

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Seems like winzip and pkzip had overlapping time frames for the same function, so it basically just came down to if people were more into windows or DOS. I was using mainly DOS for stuff like that through the mid 90s (distinctly remember getting Doom 2 from a friend on about a dozen floppies that I used pk(un)zip to install), even if I was using windows alongside it. In fact I remember being vaguely annoyed when I got a computer that had windows that ran DOS, rather than the other way around (maybe it was XP?).

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    • [–] 16 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    People who never explored the right-click menu, apparently.

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    • [–] 14 points 4 months ago (1 child)

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

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    • [+] 49 points 4 months ago (19 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 19 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    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...

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  • [+] 24 points 4 months ago (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 14 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    How is it garbage though?

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  • [+] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (7 children)

    I don't understand how people can be using that garbage when tar exists

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months 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.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    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!

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months 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.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months 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.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months 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.

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    • [–] 8 points 4 months ago

    Why the fuck do people need winrar?

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    [–] 6 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Is it still needed? I thought there was multiple free and open source software replacements available.

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    • [–] 3 points 4 months 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.

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    [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    izarc+cli

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