Yeah definitely sounds just as simple /s
Serious question: why would one use .7z when .tar.gz and .tar.xz exist?
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 8 months ago
lemann@lemmy.one 8 months ago
For me .zip on Windows is equivalent to .tar.gz on Linux - used when I just want to send a folder in a single file very quickly.
Also handy when sending an archive to a weaker machine, that might take a while to unpack a 7z compressed at the highest setting.
.7z is when I want to send a folder encrypted, or heavily compress something to archive (like a database, documents folder, or disk image/iso). It seemingly does the impossible, shaving the size from say 60GB down to 40GB compressed if you use solid mode (which has downsides if there are multiple files in the archive). It’s incredibly flexible, but the defaults are pretty solid for most cases
BombOmOm@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Also handy when sending an archive to a weaker machine, that might take a while to unpack a 7z compressed at the highest setting.
7z files pack and unpack more quickly than Zip files since the windows zip program is only single threaded.
Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com 8 months ago
It’s like when .zip was popular I guess?
Tar.gz is a two step thingy too (maybe under the hood 7z is too) so the extraction process always seems long?
nulluser@programming.dev 8 months ago
Pro tip: Tar knows what to do if you try to untar a tar.gz file. It Just Works™.
Valmond@lemmy.mindoki.com 8 months ago
Yeah I know, and it’s only useful rarely as if you can extract directly to the target, you don’t need to have an intermediate copy (or do intermediate copying). Really nitpicking ofc.
atzanteol@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Eh? ‘tar xvf foo.tar.gz’ is “technically” 2 steps I guess, but that’s pretty well hidden from the user.
RoyaltyInTraining@lemmy.world 8 months ago
7z files can be browsed without decompressing the contents, and tar.xyz archives preserve file system attributes like ownership. They have totally different use cases.
If I want to back up a directory on my drive, I would use tar.xz. But if I want to send some documents to other people, I would use 7z.
barsoap@lemm.ee 8 months ago
.7z and .xz are (essentially) the same compression algorithm but it’s applied either to the whole chunk of data, or to individual files. That has its pros and cons.
More practically though windows users don’t know what the hell tarballs are, and I’ve even seen some bonkers handling like turning a tar.gz into a tar first that you then have to unpack.
crispy_kilt@feddit.de 8 months ago
They’re Windows users
Aux@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Tared files are cancer and should never be used for any reason.
pastermil@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Clearly you’ve never used Linux
pascal@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Clearly you never needed that single file quickly from a 5gb and 12,000 files tgz archive.
theneverfox@pawb.social 8 months ago
Wtf are you on… It’s literally just a way to turn a bunch of files into one. You can feed it into a makefile and make a single file installer like nothing. Apps are based on the concept. It’s a key technology for all sorts of applications
It’s so simple it works for anything, anywhere… It’s like saying virtualization is cancer. It’s often annoying when you have to interact with it directly, but everything we love is built on it
Aux@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Tared compressed files are bad archives. You can’t retrieve a single file without unpacking everything. You can’t add new files or replace contents of existing files without unpacking and repacking everything. They are just very outdated and have poor design. There are no reasons to use them.
theneverfox@pawb.social 8 months ago
They’re bad for storing files, but a great way to turn a folder into a file.
Installers don’t need to be modified or used in part
lmaydev@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Why would you use any of them when zip exists?
Patch@feddit.uk 8 months ago
Zip has a worse compression ratio than 7z, and that’s a disadvantage for the average user (for example, a user with an email attachment size limit that they need to stay under).
If Windows natively supports one of the better alternatives, there’s no reason to keep using zip. It’s a 30 year old format, and it’s something that regular users will happily just go with whatever’s default.
BombOmOm@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Not only does Zip have a worse compression ratio than 7z, but it even takes longer to make the zip due to the fact the windows zip program is single threaded.
pastermil@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I know for a fact .tar.xz offers the best compression rate for my use case.
lmaydev@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Then you aren’t an average user.
msage@programming.dev 8 months ago
It also takes forever to pack.
I ran benchmarks for syslog compression/decompression, and ended up using plzip, which used lzma, just because it was the fastest decompression while still having only marginally worse ratio.
But it still takes forever to pack.