I don't understand how some people can be using that garbage when 7zip exists
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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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...
In fact both of them are developed by russians
Isnt winrar developed by some people in Berlin?
It was invented and developed by a Russian but the company that sells it is registered in Germany.
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.
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
How is it garbage though?
It's closed source
But it works.
People often overestimate how much a normal everyday user needs or cares. Goes for pretty much everything, tech, music, art, etc.
I don't understand how people can be using that garbage when tar exists
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.
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.
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.
$ tar cvf foo.tar.pixz -Ipixz foo/
pixz is packaged in Debian-family distros.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Maybe enterprise support? It know this is important for many companies or governmental agencies.
People, not companies
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.
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.
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
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.
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?).
This feels like when that fish was discovered that was thought to have been extinct for millions of years.
Coelacanth
People who never explored the right-click menu, apparently.
I'd like to see you make a RAR file with that Right Click Menu.
Why the fuck do people need winrar?
Is it still needed? I thought there was multiple free and open source software replacements available.
Corporate wants to pay because "huh missing spend? this guy must be stealing then"
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.
izarc+cli