Like when you send a .7z instead of a .zip or .rar to a friend or a teacher because that’s what your computer has installed and they’re like “Oh No, not one of those, now I have to install 7Zip” even though the same program that opens .rar also opens .7z I feel like people are way more annoyed when they receive a .7z
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No?
I just used 7Zip to compress to a .zip file when sending to anyone who I supect is tech illiterate.
Now I’m on linux, I don’t even know what application is doing the compressing, I just right click stuff in dolphin to compress/uncompress things using whatever format is suitable.
and people still think linux is hard
It can be. But pick a stable distro, and as long as you get past installation, you’ll be set.
I put Vanilla OS on my sister’s laptop, showed her the “app-store” (flatpak) and she’s been happily minecrafting and firefoxing ever since.
Yeah my mom’s 80 and her laptop runs Ubuntu. For the day to day stuff it’s dead simple, I haven’t had to do “tech support” for her in years
To be fair, someone with a more basic grasp of computers probably has fewer use cases that Linux will give you trouble with. I installed PuppyLinux on some ancient machine for someone I was renting from in like '08 and it was fine for her, but that’s because all she ever did was look at YouTube and check her email. It didn’t have any of the features of modern Ubuntu and the UI was clunky; if memory serves it didn’t even have DHCP.
It worked fine for basic browsing, but if you tried to do anything more complex, you’d better be ready to learn a thing or two.
Today it’s still pretty similar. Ubuntu and GNU at large have come a long way in the past couple of decades, but you still start running into issues when you get to more niche use cases.
I’d probably be running Ubuntu as my daily if Solaar worked properly with my MX Ergo, but it doesn’t, so I can’t. I guess I could go learn how to make contributions to patch that myself, and I may at some point, but at the moment I have stuff to get done and dealing with an unexpected hiccup in my workflow too often brings everything to a grinding halt.
What does it mean to not have DHCP? Does that mean you need to either pray the router is ok with you squatting on an IP, or you need to explicitly tell the router an IP will be reserved?
You had to manually configure your IP on the PC’s end. In practice it just meant you had to hit a button to connect to your network when you boot up. Considering that like a decade earlier we were all on dialup it didn’t feel that weird at the time.
I was also getting my internet via cantenna back then, so DHCP was the least of my worries!
Normally it means that people have to set their network IP when they connect their device since they are not automatically assigned one. If the IP is taken, the router will tell you. If you don’t set an IP, the connection will simply fail. You are basically forcing every device in your network to have a static IP.
The upside is that you don’t have changing IPs in your network. I use my phone to control Kodi on my RPi and if I didn’t force a static IP on it, I would have to search for the Kodi host probably every time I restart the RPi.
Most routers and host clients do support IP reservation while still having DHCP enabled tho, so disabling DHCP is not really necessary these days. It wasn’t so smooth 20 years ago tho.
Yeah that’s a good point, the simple stuff will surprisingly enough tend to be simple
I did this, picked a stable distro (Ubuntu) and had endless problems. Each time I was told that I just picked the wrong distro (and they recommended a different one each time), or that I shouldn’t want to do what I wanted to do, or that it’s my fault for not having compatible hardware, or that if I want something I should just code it myself. Switched back to Windows eventually. Linux is great for server but I wouldn’t touch it again on desktop.
Enjoying life in 2003?
Damn, when was this? I can’t remember the last time I installed Linux on a machine and had this experience.
I understand the frustration. Except the point about hardware. I mean, yeah, of course you need to pick hardware that’s compatible with the OS you want to run. Can we blame HP for not being compatible with macOS, or an iPhone for not running Android? Hardware needs drivers, so if your hardware isn’t compatible, that’s just… reality. 99% of the time I hear this complaint it’s either a wifi card or an Nvidia GPU lol
Earlier this year. I was using a thinkpad x1 carbon laptop, supposedly a good laptop for that but still had problems. I was using an nvidia gpu, granted and one of my issue was related to WiFi
Majority of my problems have by solved by not having Nvidia graphics. Personally Linux has been great at extending the life of old computers for me. Linux mint runs a million times faster than windows 10 on my old machines. But it also helps I am fairly tech literate so problems that come up don’t register as a bif of a deal to me compared to others.
Yeah, I was using nvidia graphics so a lot of my issues were definitely caused by that.
When was this? When I finally went full time a year ago, compatibility and ease of use had improved greatly since the previous time I tried to leave Windows. And it sounds like the people giving you advice were gate-keeping assholes.
Any distro can install and run any software, choosing one is really just a matter of getting something that is already as close to the config you want as possible.
Not to discount your experience, but you’re only one data-point. The vast majority, in my experience, encounter few, if any, issues. And the ones they do can be solved by someone who knows even just the basics of linux. I’ve made the jump on several systems, for myself and other users.
A lot of windows know-how is useless, and linux newbies who are used to windows may look for solutions in the wrong places, and hence don’t find any. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or are more complex than on windows. I did this myself, bashing my head on problems with simple solutions, simply because I didn’t know those solutions. Windows would seem pretty “complex” too if you didn’t know the control panel exists, or what it’s for.
For windows, the know-how for solving problems is simply more accessible. If you don’t know someone who can help with linux, and don’t want to learn, then yeah, by all means, stick to windows.
But linux can absolutely be a good experience on desktop. And who knows, any given person can give it a try, and chances are, their system wont run into any issues at all!
This was earlier this year. Last time I tried it before that was in 2013 and I had heard that Linux had advanced a lot since then so was hopeful for giving it a try. I think you’re right to a degree that I don’t have as many issues with Windows because I know how to fix most issues there. However, one of the first issues I ran into on Linux was trying to increase the scroll speed on my mouse and searching showed me the only solution was a 3rd party program that listens for scroll events and just doubles them up which was far from ideal.
That’s because the kinda people who push Linux irl still tend to be the arch/Gentoo/random niche distro kinda people.
That’s why I don’t even recommend it to people anymore. Over the years I’ve lost track of all the distros and I wouldn’t even know what to tell someone to install.
Honestly, I’m not a Linux person. I’ve been thinking about it, however I’m being held back by the fact that I think some of the software I use probably wouldn’t work in Linux, even with wine or proton. I know, I know, I can dual-boot Linux with windows, however really I don’t really want to fuck around with having to reboot everytime I want to use Substance Painter (rip Substance for Linux, if it weren’t for that I’d be dipping my toes in again) or some niche game modding tool that doesn’t play well with
emulationcompatibility layers. Also I have an Nvidia card because there’s a ton of support for Cuda (but not a lot of support for amd compatible GPU compute apis), and I’ve heard those don’t usually play well with Linux.If I had to choose a distro to recommend for a non-techy person though, it’d probably be something like Mint or Ubuntu, and I’d make sure wine and/or proton is installed. Additionally, I’m not sure if wine or proton have the ability to setup a config database (it’s been a long time since I tried to use Linux), but I’d also setup something like that with all the most commonly used configs so that whenever a new program is launched in wine/proton, it searches the DB and then uses whatever config is set to be “the best”. That way grandpa can install and play his hoyle card game or whatever without having to call me over every time he wants to use something new (though I’ll be honest, he’d probably do that anyway because it’d be a reason to spend time with me, sorry grandpa :c).
(Edited because I realized I used the wrong term, pls don’t burn me at the stake Linux nerds)
My reasons are almost the exact same as yours. CUDA, software compatibility, and not wanting to mess with dual boot in case I mess up. I ended up trying linux mint on an external drive and it works pretty well, but I don’t think I see myself using this full time beyond software development.
I swapped to Ubuntu after windows 7 (refused to use 8/10). I find it much easier to work with than windows, but Ubuntu is the only distro I’ve used.
I’m not really an advanced user; I do some minor self hosting, and sometimes enjoy looking into new functionalities, but I’m not a huge computer person at all. Ubuntu worked perfectly well once I got the display driver issue sorted.
Holy shit is drive/file management sleek as fuck, especially if you move drives frequently. The disc management gui was just what it needed to be. The bulk rename utility being a standard, and easy as hell to use, was so so so fucking helpful, especially fixing all 26 seasons of original doctor who (each season is broken down into several miniseries, and were named like S01E01P01, S01E01P02, so not a workable naming scheme for Plex).
I learned a bunch of terminal commands because I like command line, it’s just more transparent and easier in the long run. Learned to add my software’s repositories for updates, which was super nice. But it’s a super nice and easy OS, and learning stuff in general was pretty optional.
The mobo died and I replaced the whole thing with a cheap win 11 computer. I can’t stand it and will be rebuilding my beast. Once my self-host servers are properly migrated to Linux, I’ll format the windows one to throw a different distro on to play with as my daily use computer.
The hard part is happening to only own hardware that has software supporting it that isn’t out of date. That and a lot of gaming.
It would be more correct to say some gaming. I don’t even check if games work anymore before buying, I just assume that they do, and so far they have.
Yeah at this point it’s mostly those games with heavy DRM and/or anti-cheat that don’t work properly on Linux. Proton has done wonders for compatibility otherwise.
Ehh, I would take those Proton ratings with a grain of salt. I’ve definitely run into issues trying to run stuff that’s supposed to be silver or gold. But again it all comes down to what your specific use case is. Hardware, software, peripherals, and goals and preferences.
I don’t even look at the ratings. I just buy games and play them. What would I do with a grain of salt?
Lick it.
I’m not even remotely experienced and could install Pop!_OS alongside Windows 10. As simple as following a tutorial on YouTube.
no, I’m civilized. I use .tar.zstd
I love sending this to my windows friends
Windows 11 will soon support .tar.zst/.tar.bz2/.rar/.7z and a bunch of other formats.
If your friends are running the dev/insider branches of Windows, their computer already opens these folders as if they’re .zip files.
saaame
use 7zip zstd!
Cool kids use .tar.xz
Use .arc for old time’s sake.
whats so good about those
A few features of how tar archives work:
Fun examples of how this can all come together:
In practice, you double click your .tar.gz and it opens in your preferred archiver and it’s no different than a zip file.
It is rather useful to be able to do all of that on the fly though, especially when you’re shipping GBs and you may not have enough space to store both the original files and the archive you’re creating.
Awesome thanks for the all this info!
you can pipe a shell command directly into the archive. they’re also a standard archive format understood by most computers on earth.
or maybe this was a joke reply.
Go out of your way to compress files into tar.gz to freak the normies
Compress a tar.gz into a 7z into a rar into a zip
You monster!
This is giving me old eMule warez vibes.
The power of the matrix, in the palm of my hand.
Could be worse: I was all for the .ARJ church back then. LHA was also considered
Trading disks back in high school we’d exclusively use arj, and intentionally roll the “r” sound because arrrrrj 🏴☠️
Pirates don’t stereotypically roll Rs, they growl them.
I always send a targz first and only upon request will I send anything else
I did that once. They didn’t even notice. Really bummed me out. To be fair, it was after I had them install 7Zip, so the fault is mine. Haha
do .tar.zst and you get Facebook hate on top of that too from nerds (Zstandard was created by Facebook)
Actually, no. Yann Collet, the creator of the famous LZ4, created Zstd as a way to bridge the gap between LZ4 and LZMA based compression ratios while finding a Pareto frontier for compression speed and ratio. Yann Collet works at Facebook. Zstd is open source.
If they complain about about a .7z file send them a .tar.gz file.
Also make sure you divide it into multiple files, and add a password.
Break out goold old .ace just to fuck with em.
Then split that into a few hundred 1.36mb file segments and send them along with a handful of par files. Not par2, just par.
And then put that in a tarball
Wait, people still use RAR?
I mean, I paid for winrar sooo…
Oh that was you?
You are the one!
No you didn’t Mr Simpson, no one did.
You what now?
I got a rar file for work a few weeks ago and had the same thought. ‘RAR is still a thing!?!?’
That doesn’t count, businesses will continue to use whatever they have instead of upgrading if it’s still fit for purpose.
see also COBOL
“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the
abyssCOBOL, theabyssCOBOL gazes also into you.”They’ve certainly become a lot more…
Nope, not gonna do it.
Come on man, you think of how many Dads you’d make proud.
Just edit the comment
You know you want to
embrace the daditude, OP
RAR5 is a nice format with a very good compressor. More efficient than 7z. However I believe 7z with lzma2 can be tuned for a better compression ratio when throwing a lot of RAM and CPU on the problem. But for day to day usage, I prefer the speed of RAR.
No, RAR5 is not more efficient than 7Z. 7Z ratio can be 5-10% better. Even the speed advantage is gone during the last couple years. RAR does have recovery record support, however, and better Unix/Windows precision timestamp support.
.rar is an awful proprietary format that needs to die, and die soon. You should NEVER use .rar files when sending files to others due to its closed proprietary nature.
.zip is preferable because everyone can handle it by default. 7z is OK because nearly everyone can handle it by default and it is an open format.
I recently had to figure out how to un-ARJ an archive that originally spanned 5 floppies!
Anyone remember “master splitter” for splitting files up between floppies? Used that to transfer so many mp3s back in the day… Lol
Wow mp3 files on floppies??
Yeah was a strange time, zip drives were a thing but not very widespread or useful. USB drives weren’t a thing yet and CD Burners were extremely expensive. So this is how I moved MP3s from our PC with internet to the other PCs in the house. We eventually got a router and networked the house a year or two after that.
But I paid for WinRAR.
Nonsense. I do not use RAR anymore, but sure as hell there does not exist a production stable robust archival format as great as RAR. It has the most complete Unix/Windows precision timestamp support AND recovery record feature builtin. It also has features like locking archive.
ZIP is a close second, with 7Z following and the rest way behind.
Just send a zip dude. You said yourself 7zip can already handle them. You’re pointlessly making others install an application because of your personal preference hehe
.7z is supported by most popular applications, and offers better compression than a .zip or .rar in my experience.
Unless you’re saying normally people rely on Windows Explorer for their (de)compression needs ? (･o･;)
I never apologize for my chosen file format. If they can’t read it, they don’t deserve it.
Best regards,
.tbz gang
.tar.zst is my go-to nowadays. .txz if I need wide compatibllity.
Can’t comment on that because I don’t send archives very often, but here’s my aliases (aliae?) in my .bashrc to make extracting easier:
alias 7x=‘7z x’
alias untar=‘tar -xvf’
alias untargz=‘tar -xvzf’
alias untarxz=‘tar -xf’
alias ux=‘unrar x’
and for zip files it’s just unzip
Modern
tarhandles all of those withtar xfWouldn’t ‘7z x’ handle all of the above as well?
Sort of.
7z xon a.tar.gz(or.tar.xz) gives you a.tar. If you don’t mind running7z xagain on that tar, it worksThanks for the tip!
I have an
extractalias that just checks the extension and uses the right command. Upside is I didn’t have to remember tar’s flags in years. Downside is when I don’t have my alias (e.g. remote machine) I’m stuck googling lolCheck out
atoolwhich is basically a program for dispatching to such aliases (aliases that it already provides on its own).7zip creates ZIP files too, I have that at work. Are you trying to make people think you are smarter or something?
Zip is a standard format, there’s a reason for having standardized workflows and no one should be punished for using those. If I primarily use 7z I’d still send zip archives like you said.
Make things easy for people around you
I mean 7z is standardized and open source, and offers better compression. Why not make it the standard?
It’s not solving anything novel that zip isn’t already doing and zip format already has the benefit of reaching the market early. The slight benefit will be overlooked until a big marketing campaign sways a huge population (like iPhone adapting it as standard)
Windows and mac both support .zip natively, until 7z joins this category there’s no reason for an average person to manually download an extra software they’ve never heard of like unarchiver or 7-zip
7Z has about 250-300% better compression ratio than ZIP.
I’m sure, but most use cases for archives isn’t to reduce file size but rather have them neatly packaged into 1 file.
If I wanted to save space on my device, I’d probably use a tar ball or 7zip. And even then it depends a lot on what kind of files are being compressed. Images and music files don’t nearly have the same level of compression as text.
Edit: 7z supremacy
I am uhh… am a file compression fanatic on the levels of FitGirl and Razor1911.
Those compressions are a piece of art, hate that it takes hours to unpack them.
I might dig through old hard drives and compress everything since I barely touch them anyways. Definitely missing out on the compression revolution
No, not really. SREP+LOLZ does take time for video games but it can shave off ~20% more than 7Z LZMA2 or FreeARC maxed custom settings, and the decompression times are not that different, maybe 1.5-2x that of 7Z. Basically near PAQ levels without the PAQ speeds. The most you will really gain is from compressing videos with high bitrates (HEVC/AV1) and video game ROMs and game titles using tools that FitGirl, Razor and other Russian repackers use.
The cost of one time compression is forever harvested storage space savings, and time saved with bandwidth during read/write and upload/download. Compression is a space-time life hack. Pareto frontier for most people is 7Z/RAR, not Zstd for people other than web content delivery servers. Most people value bandwidth upload/download savings and storage space savings over faster content delivery times.
7z for personal archives I do not intend to send
zip for stuff I intend to send.
I usually go with zip. It’s supported by default on all sane operating systems. There’s no reason to overly complicate things for other people. No one is going to be impressed by your choice of compression format.
except, when you actually need the compression part
Which is not an issue in 99% of the cases
Add five nines to that.
Right? Elitism in this thread is strong. I have never been in a situation where I NEED to use 7z instead of zip.
Unix (including Linux and BSD) tend to prefer tar. I have seen many Unix systems without zip support, but have yet to find one that does not have tar, even imbedded systems with just a few megs of disc and ram have tar
If they choose to use some obscure Unix system as their daily driver then it’s on them. Unless they specifically request tar or some other format, go with the safest option, which is zip.
People who are using Unix based systems know how to install a zip utility if their OS doesn’t natively support it (most do) and can do so in seconds.
Imagine me sending tar.gz without second though.
It was first time they saw file with two extensions. They got scared and worried.
Are there any examples of multiple file extensions outside of compression and archiving?
Sexylady.jpg.exe
Everything is a valid file extension in bash
It’s common when you “wrap” one file type inside another. Like .tar combines multiple files into one, then .gz compresses a single file.
You also see it with PGP (encryption).
Suppose I have a javascript file for a node server’s backend access named
db.jsSuppose I write tests for those functions and name the test script file
db.test.jsSuppose I tar and gzip that file (bear with me), now named
db.test.js.tar.gzSuppose I sign that file with PGP, now named
db.test.js.tar.gz.pgpNow suppose I want to hide that signed compressed tarball of a javascript tests file for my db functions, and to do so, I name it
.db.test.js.tar.gz.pgpNow I have a file that looks like it consists of nothing but extensions. I’m sure you could push it even further though, if you tried.
Hmmm… nothing comes to mind, only tar.
Denoting video codecs in the 00s, I guess - xvid.mp4
deleted by creator
“Oh No, not one of those, now I have to install 7Zip,” said no one ever.
7-Zip is excellent. It’s the de facto standard archiving and compression tool on Windows, and for good reason.
I work in a place where the computers are very locked down. You cannot install anything of your own. You always have to go through the helpdesk, which can take a few days to resolve your ticket. We have 7zip installed by default but if that was not the case, this could easily be a problem. Sending stuff as .zip is always the safest way if you don’t know what environment your recipient is using.
Why does it take days?
There’s usually an entire approval process every software request goes through. First it needs a legit business use case that one of our current approved pieces of software cannot do. For example, they may not let you install Chrome because they officially support Edge since it’s heavily tied into the Microsoft ecosystem, and therefore don’t want to deal with managing Chrome in the environment.
If it’s a new piece of software, then it goes through a security review through the security team. Verify there’s nothing in it that oversteps it’s bounds, has no known security vulnerabilities, comes from a respectfully company that hasn’t done things like tax evasion, things like that. After security approves it then legal has to review the EULA or any licensing agreements. Company lawyers don’t really like doing this because it can be time consuming and low on their priority list.
After it’s approved, including any potential costs that the responsible parties accept, the operations team has a go at it. They don’t want to have to manually install it and maintain it on your computer, so they package it up and test it in a testing environment. After verifying the package can be deployed, configured, and kept up to date, or even completely removed remotely, then it gets put in to the production deployment, and finally sent to install on your machine.
Keep in mind that these employees are also doing all their other daily tasks. They’re not sitting there churning out app deployment packages. Maybe they only meet once a week for 30 minutes to approve software, and maybe they ran out of time before your request made the agenda. Maybe the security team held up on it because they had to deal with an emergency.
This is why some big companies can take a lot longer to get software approvals compared to places with one or two techs in the IT department.
Many of those steps should be trivial in this case, since 7-Zip is a popular open-source project.
Right, and generally they are for all but the specialized or large scale software, but it’s still the typical “hurry up and wait” scenario. The manager that needs to approve the business use case could be in meetings all day, then legal may be buried in a case taking all their attention so they won’t be able to review the license for a day or two, maybe the IT ops team didn’t get the request until 4:55 on a Friday afternoon, but no step can be done in the process without completing all the prior steps, and even the smallest piece of software still goes through the process in some form. The main point I was trying to get across is that it’s not an assembly line, and even if only one person is needed to approve it you still have to wait for that person to have time to do it.
Big companies are slow.
I like that your comment is the tl;dr for the above comment
We have usually more important tickets like “I can’t use my computer at all” or “my server is burning”. And as such are lower on the priority list.
I’ve said that.
Was going to check a file another student sent me. I was at school, so I used one of the school computers. These computers are locked down, which means I can’t install whatever I want on them. Needless to say, I was unable to open the 7z file the other student sent me until I got home. So much time wasted.
Pretty sure 7z has a portable edition you can just download and run without installing.
I would imagine downloaded exe files are also blocked.
Good point. There are ways around it, but only tech savvy people are going to do those, so probably best to just use zip.
USBs?
In reality they say “what is .7z?”
The only annoying thing is setting up file association with 7zip. Why have the devs not made sure that it’s a simple task?
I just use 7zip to make .zip if I think the person I’m sending it to won’t know what a .7z is or how to unzip it.
I don’t really see the point in using .rar or .7z in 90% of cases, makes very little difference in filesize compared to zip and anyone can open it without problems
Different locales might face formatting problems in the filename in non Latin characters like Chinese characters or hangul when using zip. 7z helps with that.
Oh really? Haven’t heard of that but doesn’t surprise me
Wouldn’t that just be a case of fixing .zip to support those characters though? Surely it can be updated
Just make a zip, you clown.