Well now I'm definitely not buying it.
I never understood the appeal of paid programs. 7-Zip works equally well and is free and open source software. It integrates much nicer into File Explorer as well.
Supporting the developers??
I agree that 7zip is great (albeit based in Russia, so not something I'm sure I want to support at the moment), but consider for a moment that winrar licencing is primarily aimed at businesses (which is why they don't bother locking personal users out after the trial ends), and for that money you get a certain guarantee of functionality and stability over a long period of time.
There's absolutely no guarantees that 7zip will continue to be developed, or that it will retain it's current features and functionality - the developer can turn it into a Minesweeper clone if they feel like it, and there's nothing a business can do but keep using an outdated and thus potentially dangerous version that will eventually become unusable.
You also get a certain level of customer service and corporate communication between the purchasing company and the production company to help resolve issues, which may not exist at all with the alternative.
It's also not always wise to have your business rely heavily on a tool that only sees development through volunteer work by a limited number of disparate people that may come and go, and while I don't know how large the volunteer base is that works on 7zip (it could be just the one guy, it could be a hundred people), to a company it'll never feel as reliable an option as relying on a tool that sees development and maintenance through a paid, full time staff at an established legal entity company with an established reputation.
And speaking for a moment to that established company bit, consider that winrar's company is based in Berlin, within the European Union and under it's rules and laws, which is a far better proposition from a company's standpoint than having to legally deal with an individual guy inside the Russian Federation, especially one that hasn't actually sold your business a product at all.
Anyway, just a few potential thoughts for why tools that do the same job might be preferred by a business, sorry it got a bit long 😅
I mean, does paying for winrar somehow guarantee that it will keep being actively developed?
7zip is FOSS, GPL license. Even if the author stops others can step in. Even if nobody does and it stops being actively developed you'll still be able to extract your archives for the foreseeable future. You can still unpack ARC files from the 80s.
Just because someone was born in Russia does not make them a specific type of person. Nobody chooses where or when they are born. 7-Zip has been for ages, and if something were to happen to it then im sure one of the dozen of forks around will take the role as the "main one". However you are right, companies desire something predictable, stable. Which is why some companies like SUSE, Red Hat, etc. Manage to sell FOSS. in fact i believe some of these distros include p7zip, and they freeze it to a specific version, security updates and bug fixes are backported.
I like WinRAR for its built-in parity functionality. You can achieve similar results with 7-Zip using PAR2, but having it built right into WinRAR with two options (add a recovery record to each archive, or create separate recovery archives (basically what PAR2 does)) is so much more convenient.
WinRAR is like what..? 30-35 bucks? That's per user, unlimited machines, lifetime license. More than fair I'd say.
"Embrace ~~tar.gz~~ 7zip, son!"
Why is there rarely a mention of 7zip?
I feel like I’ve seen it mentioned like 50 times in the past two weeks here on Lemmy.
7zip
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[Sigh]... *7zip*
Also
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Well at least someone's gonna make money from WinRAR users
Just use 7-Zip
if you’re on Windows use NanaZip. 7Zip refuses to use modern compression and encryption algorithms or integrate with the new Windows APIs. NanaZip is a fork that does just that.
Interesting. About a month ago I joined the elite club of WinRAR licence owners.
These hackers must be targeting you, then.
I bought mine and own it happily - us licence holders should all get together, we could probably fill up a Chuck-E-Cheese
Well, good that Windows now has native RAR support.
Somehow Windows has always been and is still crap at managing archives. Ultra-slow, has trouble opening or extracting individual files inside the archive, etc.
However, 7-zip has been doing all that perfectly forever now. Not sure why anyone would use WinRAR, paid for or not.
the only reason anyone still uses this shit is ignorance
On a very very rare occasion I've had to use it for scene cracks as other apps didn't work. They use WinRAR to archive it so on those very rare occasions it's the only thing that unpacks it
However, from a practical perspective, deceiving users into performing the required action shouldn't be overly challenging, and given the vast size of WinRAR's user base
Excuse me, but "vast" size of WinRAR's user base? I didn't know WinRAR even had any users left.
9 out of 10 people I know use WinRAR. It's amongst the very firsr software they install at fresh start.
I myself also just changed to 7-Zip around... I don't know, a year ago?
Which part of the world is this, if you don't mind me asking? (just genuinely curious, cause I haven't come across any WinRARs in the wild here in NZ, most folks I know use either 7-Zip or PeaZip).
I'm from Europe, in the embrace of the Carpathian Mountains :)
before WinRAR, people used WinZIP here in the '00s (at least Windows folks). Again, a strange choice, I know.
Am in the US and used winrar for a long time as it was integrated into Usenet binaries as rar files. It was embedded with some other software.
WinRAR was what I used in the 2000s. Around 2011, 7-zip was my goto. I haven't looked back since.
I wasn't aware of pea-zip until this thread
There is that one last user
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/lX_pF03vCSU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Well, even FAR manager which they've open-souced long time ago is still maintained 😀 Good thing they didn't discover this bug in 2000s!
That looks quite interesting, seems like they've even got quite an extensive list of plugins - looks like may be even better than Midnight Commander. :o
It's what we get for not buying it XD
It's been like at least 5 years since I've seen a rar file.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
