7zip is the program you want to handle most everything, with both gui and command line options: http://www.7-zip.org/
Given how radically MS is trying to reform itself to be an open-source friendly company and how ineffectually inoffensive they've been the last 5 years, can we at least try and throw them a bone or two?
I've preferred Mac systems for longer than most of the HN crowd has been alive, so I understand what it's like to feel ignored and in the minority. For years, Mac users were treated as pariahs. The tables have turned, and as someone who has been in your situation, I should have great empathy for your predicament.
And I do, but your tone in general -- and your last sentence in particular -- makes it very hard to empathize. Microsoft used its near-monopoly status to stifle innovation for years, and many of us have figurative scars that will never heal. You seem to think that they are making great strides (while I see them as half-hearted overtures), but either way I'm not about to "throw them a bone." Their decades of misdeeds, in my eyes, will not be expiated so easily.
Perhaps Microsoft will someday be worthy of forgiveness, either from the perspective of morality (e.g., Mozilla) or product excellence (e.g., Apple). Until that day, Microsoft will continue to reap what they have sown, given no more attention than they have earned.
I feel like Apple's has forgotten what was important, created then ruined a market, and lost everything that made it interesting (long before Steve Jobs passed away, by the way). Which cuts all the more deeply because back in the early 2ks they were walking the walk and taking a lot from NeXT's culture of developer friendliness. I grew up deeply invested in Macs and NeXT, which makes the realization painful, but... Apple wants to annihilate maker culture as it monetizes its platform. It's also stopped caring about design on a grand scale, instead appealing to very shallow notions of "visual simplicity".
That's all gone now, and they're consequently useless to me. I'd rather patronize a company currently doing the right thing after a troubled past than pretend a previously aligned company was still there.
It should be very telling that Apple AND Google's flagship hardware announcement of 2015 was something that Microsoft has been doing for years.
And if Microsoft suddenly goes evil again? Fuck them, I'll drop them and move somewhere else. Not Linux, unless the distros pull their act together, but I'm sure a competitor will emerge. Or I'll make one.
It's sort of a rough time for devs right now even as we enjoy unprecedented prosperity and recognition. Big businesses are attempting to monetize and control every aspect of developers.
> Windows: ? (No idea, I haven't touched the platform in a while... should WORK!)
I do think the author missed the ball in not doing basic research for the Windows platform. His point is that people should switch from one compression tool to another. If people on Windows were unable to compress or decompress such files, that would be a huge problem for his argument.
That said, I don't agree with the GP's tangent.
Powershell can run on Linux, too. I've even met a few people who quietly prefer it.
So what, exactly, were you referring to? Shell choices are like editor choices: arbitrary and largely equivalent and without any real meaning or impact on a developer's productivity.
Right and putting that in google, "tar equivalent for windows", immediately nets 5 useful results. You can use tar, or a windows command line variant of 7z or tar, or a gui.
> With out-of-the-box Windows machine, you cannot ssh, you cannot untar, etc.
On an out-of-the-box Linux machine, you generally can't do a lot of things either. It seems particularly ironic that in a discussion about how we shouldn't be using old UNIX tools just because they're entrenched, you then call for compatibility.
> Windows-way of doing things is totally different than *nix culture (OS X, Linux, etc).
Stupid legacy path limits not included, Powershell is in my experience just a superior way to do things. I should maybe restart my blog to talk about that.
But even if we ignore Powershell and windows, your statement is divisive within the Linux community. MANY people prefer shells on Linux that don't adhere to the bash legacy. TCSH and CSH are very popular, to this day. Are they 'not interoperable'?
Everyone's got a big chip on their shoulder about how development tooling "should be." One of the things I've come to realize is how arbitrary, unnecessary, and useless these mores are. They just hold us back.
Minimal distros aside, you must be kidding.
But you're right, 7z is an under-appreciated format.