Windows 11 adding native support for winRAR, 7zip, tar, and gzip
theverge.com
theverge.com
After changing our data delivery pipeline to bzip2 I patted myself on the back for finding an easy win which significantly reduced data size and increased compression speed. Fast forward a month or two later I get word that one of our clients is having problems uncompressing the data we sent them. It turns out that there were still windows 10 versions out in the wild that don’t support bzip2 zip files. I begrudgingly cursed windows and reverted my change, robbed of my small victory.
It truly is amazing how terrible compression support has been in windows. I could compress a +100GB data archive in under a minute using pigz, but since we had to support windows it would take over 30 minutes to compress the file using deflate. I calculated that with the space savings of gzip we could ship a gzip binary embedded with the data in a smaller size than the deflate data on its own. Unfortunately it was a no-go to ship decompression binaries with embedded data, but I thought it would be a cool idea to use cosmopolitan libc to create a platform agnostic binary which when run uses gzip/bzip/lz4 to quickly decompress the data in a platform agnostic way. I imagine such binaries would be picked up by anti-virus but it would be cool to be able to compress data with the latest algorithms without needing the client to have the matching decompression libraries.
I don't mean to be flippant. But I recently had to convert Phillips proprietary DS2 audio format file to MP3, and purchased Phillips software to do that. And then financials came down hard because it wasn't on the approved software list.
But I do know what a pain some IT shops can be.
I know it's a favorite program of a lot of people but personally I just think that's testament to how bad the situation is on windows.
I've not seen this in practice. Sure, it has a clunky gui, but outside of that 7-zip has excellent windows 10 or less integration and works fine in windows 11 even though the jerkwad potentates at M$ decided to hide the usual explorer options behind a second panel.
If you work IT support in any capacity, you should accept that your job is to solve problems for people who are doing things you either can't do or don't want to do.
Their experience is outside of your wheelhouse, and you are there to make the technology transparent to their job function. If you can't do your job with a glad heart then find a different one.
Have some humility.
Feels like not getting anything in return from giant corporations making billions of dollars is in the spirit of BSD style open source.
I think its perfectly OK for big companies to use FOSS tools without contributing anything. Why do you care? Authors gave it to the world for free or they would use more restrictive licence.
If the big company really wants some more stuff in it, they will probably contribute or donate anyway.
To me, it seems this is irrelevant methaphysical question that those that don't understand FOSS constantly try to empose. Once you accept money, its a different game, with money comes expectations... If you can't do something for free, and you expect to be payed for everything, you are probably not the one that will advance the field.
I admire people that passionatelly do stuff for nothing but pure passion and sence of accomplishment. That is the world I want to live in.
Yeah, there are predators, but if you really care about it you can probably create defensive strategy to minimize those chances.
If the project is not going full-tilt as a startup, then that juice might not be worth the squeeze. Do maintainers want to add administrative duties to their plate just to maybe preemptively knee-cap large tech companies? If I this were to become a reality and I were a decision maker at a large tech company, I'd opt to pay you from the Japanese subsidiary - just 'cause.
The whole system will use between 5x and 50x the energy of just decompressing locally.
Windows = Microsoft program OneDrive = Microsoft program Extract tool = Microsoft program
Microsoft = 2.33 trillion dollar company.
Having 3 programs coded by Microsoft and baked into the operating system or included by default with the OS install actually work together: impossible
And these are on the M$ store too!
=) plenty of reason to keep win-rar around then.
I also hope wonder how they'll present .tar.gz files in the windows shell. Will you need to open the .gz, then the .tar? Or just one step. The world wonders...
Just copy the 7zip interface in file explorer and you're done. It already feels native.
tl;dr I wish Microsoft would make it more obvious when you're navigating a compressed file (and thus not a native directory).
Windows has been called many times for bundling software since it hurts other software companies. Which leads to government regulation. It is sad since I think probably the windows solution could be better in some cases with the native support.
These days the big ideas have gone away, so the small polish finally gets attention.
Keeps all kinds of features that are table stakes in Mac OS and Linux out of Windows b/c it's "anticompetitive" to bundle everything a user would want with an OS.
This will be interesting to test. When I last tried this on Windows 10, 7-zip beat Windows handily at decompressing large zip files.
I love the seamless Explorer support.
Sends a particular message to anyone considering making any tools that work with their products.
This will only have RAR extraction and UNRAR.DLL was deliberately not commercial.
So the company that developed it will be fine. You will still need winrar.