Windows 11 adds native support for RAR, 7-Zip, Tar and other archive formats thanks to open-source library

I love KDE's "extract here, autodetect folder" feature for compressed files

Literally the reason why 7 zip is the first thing I install on a windows machine.

All the linux file managers I use have that context menu built in, so nothing else to install 😅 except that I also sometimes use 7zip file manager via WINE because I like a GUI

Ditto.

Have you used Windows recently? This option currently exists as a right-click option in Windows 11.

Fun fact "nana" means 7 in Japanese.

Its what i use now its really nice

I don't use the interface, that's the thing. I just use the contextual menu - which is more than enough to operate it easily. If the windows version of it had the same, then I wouldn't mind at all.

Why would you use any of them when zip exists?

For an average user they offer no advantage.

Yeah definitely sounds just as simple /s

For me .zip on Windows is equivalent to .tar.gz on Linux - used when I just want to send a folder in a single file very quickly.

Also handy when sending an archive to a weaker machine, that might take a while to unpack a 7z compressed at the highest setting.

.7z is when I want to send a folder encrypted, or heavily compress something to archive (like a database, documents folder, or disk image/iso). It seemingly does the impossible, shaving the size from say 60GB down to 40GB compressed if you use solid mode (which has downsides if there are multiple files in the archive). It's incredibly flexible, but the defaults are pretty solid for most cases

It's like when .zip was popular I guess?

Tar.gz is a two step thingy too (maybe under the hood 7z is too) so the extraction process always seems long?

.7z and .xz are (essentially) the same compression algorithm but it's applied either to the whole chunk of data, or to individual files. That has its pros and cons.

More practically though windows users don't know what the hell tarballs are, and I've even seen some bonkers handling like turning a tar.gz into a tar first that you then have to unpack.

7z files can be browsed without decompressing the contents, and tar.xyz archives preserve file system attributes like ownership. They have totally different use cases.

If I want to back up a directory on my drive, I would use tar.xz. But if I want to send some documents to other people, I would use 7z.

They're Windows users

Tared files are cancer and should never be used for any reason.

ODF works on everything. It's reliable and fully documented. The MS office implementation contradicts its own specification and breaks. A lot.

The PK-Zip file format was released in the year 1989. The compression is terrible by modern standards.

Zip almost always results in larger archive files...

Maybe they'll get around to multithreaded (de)compression in another 20 years.

The medal will be made of copper.

And Windows still balks at most common filesystems.

They actually removed the old FTP support, it was somewhat still useful for local servers that didn't have samba shares.

Watch as they break it even more. They broke drag and drop between archives and nautilus a while ago and it remains broken to this day.

Github? You mean the one that used a legally questionable AI that borrows code from projects with licenses that don't allow you to do so under certain circumstances?

This isn't true.

You can count hundreds here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Israeli_inventions_and_discoveries

It's aimed at people who have trouble checking their email.

Opening ZIP natively in folder app really is just user friendly practices. Ofc it's easier to able to browse its content that way.

You shouldn't need 3rd party software for things that simple.

Chances are you aren't the target audience of the default configuration of windows.

Yes. How to change it?

Maybe they're like that because they've been trained that way by shit software

Yeah, it's probably best for most users, but I just personally prefer to treat them separately so I know what I'm dealing with.

Me also can't stand the changed control panel UI. Most of the times I just hit WIN+R and type "control"

I have Windows 11 on my laptop but 10 on my desktop. 11 was a mess and is still a mess. Don't get me wrong, 10, 8, 7, and Vista were that way too for like a year or two. But I feel like a lot of 11's problems are not going to be solved by bug-fixing.

When the start menu was left aligned, you can move you mouse infinitely to the lower left and still click it irrespective of the initial location of the mouse (There is a term for this concept in UX design called infinite space or similar). For similar reasons, the close (x) button is in the upper right corner.

However with the start menu in the center, you have to accurately place the mouse on the start icon and there cannot be a muscle memory since the movement depends on the initial location.

Also you can left-align win 11

Maybe if you leave the comment in a few more places, you'll contribute something

How would it be any different to the various FAT filesystems it supports now?

Pretty much all Linux FS support ACLs and have for an eternity.

The thing is that nobody uses ACLs because the good ole user/group/world rwx scheme is much less of a hassle to work with in 99.9% of the cases and the remaining 0.01% can still be done.

tell that to my btrfs formated USB sticks or when I try to access an ext4 partition from a windows machine

If these are created in 7zip there is some secure setting that has to be disabled, otherwise Windows can't open them

I understand the sentiment, but I do not come to the same conclusion that of increasing accessibility via offering more features in unfree proprietary software. The intended consequences of this were publicised by US Justice Department in their uncovering of Microsoft's memo labelled Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish which outlines how this eventually leads to less, not more, accessibility.

That aside, Microsoft Windows already supported ZIP which is an open standard. The addition of RAR, which is a proprietary unfree standard, is actually less open.

Most importantly on KDE you have "extract archive here, autodetect subfolder". Having Ark be a different program than Dolphin is also the right choice as archives aren't directories.

Also if you ever fucking make a tarball that doesn't have a top-level directory and exactly one directory at the top level everyone officially hates you.

(And yes for some unfathomable reason kde calls directories folders)

I don't think it's in any way unsafe, unless something is very wrong with the in-archiving software, in which case viewing it would likely have the same vulnerability. Files existing I don't think can cause any harm, again without some severe vulnerability somewhere along the chain. Running them is the issue.

I know that I might be a bit insufferable on this point, but I feel it bears repeating over and over. Somebody has got to do it, Microsoft fucked over this world and people still believe that Linux is decades behind windows whilst in reality it's leaps and bounds ahead. Yet people keep paying for windows shit.

People need to hear this shit, like it or not