this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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Blows my mind that anyone still uses WinRAR when 7zip exists.
What should blow your mind is that it's 2023 and you still need a separate program to extract compressed files on windows. π Good thing they're adding native support for it in windows 11. FINALLY.
Windows has had native unzip support since Microsoft Plus! 98 added it to Windows 98 in 1998.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Plus!#:~:text=ZIP%20file%20integration%20with%20Windows%20Explorer%20was%20first%20introduced%20with%20this%20version%20under%20the%20name%20of%20%22compressed%20folders%22.
I don't recall anyone having Plus! back then.
I think we did.
But it was added to base Windows in XP anyway.
When did windows have native rar support?
Since Win 11 23H2. It's not out officially yet but the insider/RC builds have had it for a while now.
You do on Linux as well, it's just installed by default.
For my personal use, Linux has every single thing I need right out of the box. That's why it's my main OS.
Your chosen GNU/Linux distribution installs the applications.
Microsoft and apple are the reasons boomers have learned helplessness with tech. It helped them sell units in the 90's to imply you didn't have to ever consider anything under the hood because it all is supposed to just work like magic. you just hit the switch and let electricity do it's thing.
That's not an inherently bad thing though, same as it's not inherently bad that not everyone can repair their car, or sew up tears in their trousers.
And often, you need two! I use both gzip and tar all the time
Same with Mac OS, itβs such a fucking no brainer and itβs not hard to impl
What could possibly go wrong.
Not like zip is supported and Windows added (finally tbf) support for other archives.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/23/23734625/microsoft-windows-11-rar-support-native
I'm willing to bet a big part of that are all the antitrust lawsuits they got for internet explorer and windows media player back in the day and just not wanting to open that box as it comes to rarlab.
.zip support they've had for well over two decades though.
Well it would blow your mind to know that many people just use whatever they know that does the job
There is a certain sense of old friend that you know by heart, I've downloaded so much things where the last step was to pass it by WinRAR, but yeah I should change when there are proofs like that
WinRAR was good in ancient times when it was the only zip program available. Even in the Windows XP era there were better things to use if you knew about them. I doubt 7zip was really that usable in the early 2000s but it eventually got good and nowadays 7zio is so good that of you aren't using it, you're doing it wrong.
FUCK WINRAR!
it's so stupid and amazing this recent celebration of people that are proud to have paid for it.
It was never a good solution really..
It just worked for what it was for a time... Because it was better than WinZip or pkzip.
7-zip has been amazing for years..
Better OS support would be cool too but it's so unnecessary thanks to 7zip.
People on Lemmy sometimes get really angry at the dumbest things.
You don't like Winrar, that's your right, chill dude.
WinRAR was great for the time and their policies on paying for the program were extremely generous. Time just overtook it.
It's essentially just shareware.
More specifically, it's nagware which wasn't particularly uncommon for the time WinRAR was introduced so I don't know that it's particularly generous really when one considers all the other nagware that came out in the late 90s.
It's just one of many different licensing strategies.
In this case it seems to have paid off for the developer as it appears to have resulted in a great deal of fondness and goodwill among a certain portion of the user base.
7z recently also had an exploit. It's not magically safer.
RAR compresses significantly faster than 7z (in relation to the compression ratio of course).
RAR has recovery records, 7z doesn't. RAR4 even had cryptographic signatures included. But RAR5 dropped that.
7z is nice, but it's not objectively better than RAR on every account.
WinRAR had a great gui and it integrates much better (imho) into windows than 7zip, only thing 7zip has going for it is it's free.
If we are talking command line, rar is free (inb4 Unix guys butt in)
The only thing I missed switching to 7zip was the UX. 7zip is a bit weird at first, but then you find out that it will extract lots of installers. So now you can just get the wifi driver and not the bloatware that comes along with it, and it's all good.
7zip integrates very nicely into Explorer (so you can right click a file or folder and compress straight from there). I admit the main GUI of 7zip looks ancient but I never needed it.
If you're on Windows (I know I know, switch to Linux) I prefer NanaZip over base 7zip
https://github.com/M2Team/NanaZip
doesn't WinRAR do certain things that 7zip doesn't?
I can't think of what 7zip lacks, but I know it does lack some features
Exactly!
And it's the only thing WinRAR does that 7zip doesn't... Besides all the things 7zip does better... Like compression... π
lol
The reason WinRAR was useful to me allllllll those years ago was for one thing and one thing only: You could split an archive into chunks. So mostly I found that it was good for getting my warez in 1.44MB chunks.
Anon: hey Krudler, do you have a cracked copy of GTA3
Krudler: say no more, friend
Sends 350 floppy disks with the cracked game
Yes. That splitting files was especially useful because emails used to have attachment size limits.
Afaik, the only thing 7Zip lacks in comparison to WinRAR is the ability to create rar files, and that's only because the format is proprietary.
this is true I actually needed to get winrar to install a free game I acquired lately 7z would not open it properly for some reason
Why not? I prefer it over 7-Zip because it has built-in parity both in the archive itself and as separate files. You can achieve the latter with 7-Zip using PAR, but it's just more convenient to have it built-in for both parity creation and recovery.
I also feel like it's consuming a lot less RAM while compressing at similar speeds and achieving similar, if not sometimes better (RAR5), results.
Just because it had a zero-day bug that has already been fixed doesn't mean it's bad software. I wouldn't be surprised if zero-days came to light in other archival software. 7-Zip isn't magically immune to this.
I don't get why someone would prefer rar over zip and 7z.
Even tar.gz and all their flavors are more common.
Yeah, well technically .cab is more common than tar.gz but that doesn't mean I'd start using it.
I personally use RAR because I think it's a better format than ZIP, but I use ZIP when I have to share the archive with anyone.
WinRAR also has clever password and encryption features. (Set short master password, quickly encrypt/decrypt any saved very long passwords.) Integration is great. Updates are regular. I only wish the UI would be updated a bit (more than just icon packs, dark mode).
There's the occasional RAR archive 7-Zip doesn't open for me, but WinRAR does. π€·π»