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
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.
I got a machine to set up as a media server and it had Windows preloaded. I’m a Windows user primarily and after an hour I got the shits and installed Mint. Command line installing is so much simpler.
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.
no, I’m civilized. I use .tar.zstd
I love sending this to my windows friends
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saaame
use 7zip zstd!
Cool kids use .tar.xz
whats so good about those
A few features of how tar archives work:
- Compression is completely independent of the file bundling process, so it’s easy to recompress or convert without potential loss of information.
- Compression works on the whole archive, so it can achieve better compression ratios if you’re compressing a bunch of text files as it just sees it as one big file
- tar archives are streamable: you can decompress and extract the files live as they’re being downloaded, or uploaded.
- tar archives can preserve permissions and user/group association, although that’s only really relevant on Linux/macOS/*BSD.
- You can copy them easily to tape drives
- It’s all open standards that are widely supported by most software, so unlike a rar or 7z, you’re pretty sure people will be able to extract those no matter what OS they use.
Fun examples of how this can all come together:
- Download a file from the Internet with curl, pipe it into the decompressor on my computer and then pipe to a Raspberry Pi over SSH and then pipe it into tar to extract it directly on it without ever needing an intermediate step as the target device have barely enough space on it to fit all the files.
- Clone a computer: tar up the whole drive, pipe that over the network to a better computer which compresses it, then pipes it to both a hard drive for archival and then split it to send it to multiple computers who will decompress and extract it to their own hard drive, and voilà you have 5 clones of the computer and a backup copy of what you just did with zero intermediate steps slowing the process down.
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.
Use .arc for old time’s sake.
Hmmm I’m more of a File.zip.tar.gz.epub.7z.xs guy
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
Then StuffIt.
Hello fellow old person. 😮💨
Then reddit? /s
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The power of the matrix, in the palm of my hand.
You monster!
This is giving me old eMule warez vibes.
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I always send a targz first and only upon request will I send anything else
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 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)
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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!?!?’
for work
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
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.
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Just make a zip, you clown.
.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.
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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･;)
“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?
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Many of those steps should be trivial in this case, since 7-Zip is a popular open-source project.
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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”.
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 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.
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
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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
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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
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.
In my experience most people don’t even know what a zip or rar is or how to extract them.
My colleague supposed to “Lead Software Engineer” doesn’t know what is mean by file compression or Zip is, she was trying to open it with notepad lol.
A Lead software engineer that doesn’t understand compression?
Wow their software is going to be awfully optimized.
That’s what happens when you hire degrees and don’t test for experience. I’ve got friends going to school for compsci degrees getting primed for 6 figure careers jumping into my DMs to ask ME networking and programming questions. I never went to college and can’t even get an interview for entry level help desk.
We have a few customers that have to download the setup/update and run it on their (windows) server.
It comes as a zip fileThe amount of users opening the zip (as a folder. not extracting) and trying to run the .exe is way too high.
Btw: The instructions are always sent with the update mail.If the zip file only contains an .exe file, it is fine to do it like that.
Windows will just extract the exe somewhere and execute it.
The problem arises when there are dependent files inside the zip as well. If only the .exe is extracted, it won’t find those.
Funny you think any user will read the manual
I’ve yet to have a developer read any kind of documentation I’ve written when I send them it (and then they call me to ask a question that’s answered in the docs)
We just sell support for the program itself and offer MSP services. Not my problem. I just get paid to answer the phone.
Send them sex instead (self extracting executables).
You can make zips using 7Zip. I use 7zip and send Zips to other people, but use 7z compression for my own files. Zip files are more ubiquitous and readily opened by most OS; certainly Windows opens them natively, and I assume MacOs does.
Of course it also depends what you’re sending. I wouldn’t send secure files in just a zip even with encryption due to zips flaws. I would use 7z eoth encryption as a minimum, and more secure methods depending on how valuable the data is.
The problem with zip is that Windows can’t open every zip file.
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No, Linux and Mac can open ZIP as easily as anything besides TGZ.
RAR is proprietary. Sending someone a RAR archive for compatibility reasons is like having sex with them for virginity reasons.
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
