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.
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can turn it into a Minesweeper clone if they feel like it, and there’s nothing a business can do but keep using an outdated and thus potentially dangerous version that will eventually become unusable.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 😅
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.
… You can’t edit files inside a zip file. The program’s just hiding that it’s decompressing and decompressing the whole thing every time you change something.
Zip files are usually just another wrapper around DEFLATE, and compressing each block requires knowledge of the previous block’s compression (Part of LZ77). It’s a streaming format, not a sparse format.
If you edit a text file, it actually just creates a new file because inserting text in the middle means all of the text after changes position. I’d still call that editing an existing file rather than creating a new file based on the previous one plus some edits. The second description might be more technically accurate but it’s just unnecessary technical details because it’s effectively the first description.
Even going back to the original use of edit, editors would mark up books or articles and then a new copy would need to be created with those edits. I’m having trouble thinking of any cases where edit truly means “change something in place without making a new copy of it with the changes included”. I guess small edits with pencil or whiteout can sometimes work.
I bought a lifetime license literally more than 20 years ago to support the developer. I use 7Zip for most stuff but prefer WinRAR for split rar archive support.
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.
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Well now I’m definitely not buying it.
does it still let you infinitely have a free trial??
Just blow the dust off that copy of serials2k 🤣
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.
Microsoft basically copied WinRAR added it to the OS, back in the windows 7 days you needed WinRAR
Back in the Windows 7 days you could use 7zip. I’ve been using it since like XP
Implementing support for a widely used format isn’t “basically copied” and there have been alternatives for decades.
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 😅
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.
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On Mac, The Unarchiver is always the correct choice.
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… You can’t edit files inside a zip file. The program’s just hiding that it’s decompressing and decompressing the whole thing every time you change something.
Zip files are usually just another wrapper around DEFLATE, and compressing each block requires knowledge of the previous block’s compression (Part of LZ77). It’s a streaming format, not a sparse format.
If you edit a text file, it actually just creates a new file because inserting text in the middle means all of the text after changes position. I’d still call that editing an existing file rather than creating a new file based on the previous one plus some edits. The second description might be more technically accurate but it’s just unnecessary technical details because it’s effectively the first description.
Even going back to the original use of edit, editors would mark up books or articles and then a new copy would need to be created with those edits. I’m having trouble thinking of any cases where edit truly means “change something in place without making a new copy of it with the changes included”. I guess small edits with pencil or whiteout can sometimes work.
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Zstd go brrr
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That’s, quite ironically, a pretty ignorant opinion. There are areas where WinRAR is stronger than 7zip.
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For me it’s laziness.
I bought a lifetime license literally more than 20 years ago to support the developer. I use 7Zip for most stuff but prefer WinRAR for split rar archive support.
And that’s how I know that voting should be a privilege, not a right.
You’re so dramatic
Truth is dramatic.
Prolific man, so true
“Embrace
tar.gz7zip, son!”Why is there rarely a mention of 7zip?
Welp. Good thing I never bought it haha.
It’s been like at least 5 years since I’ve seen a rar file.
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.
https://github.com/M2Team/NanaZip
Windows?! What?!
7-zip doesn’t exist on Linux. p7zip does, which hasn’t been updated since 2016
EDIT: It does, I stand corrected
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7zip does exist on Linux:
https://www.7-zip.org/download.html
p7zip itself is out of date but updated forks exist. With 7zip having an up to date official version though there’s no point to it.
Lol, just noticed that not only it is already installed on my system (never used it), but it also comes with a benchmark built in.
Ah, my mistake
Latest release is a touch old (2022) and it’s not the most active repo ever. Hopefully its not dying.