Technology

Not everything is a competition. If people want to support WinRAR after the developer maintained it for more than 30 years and helped out millions of people, that's just fine.

Or WinZip. I work for a company that literally has the licenses for every computer they own. Why? 7-zip is free.

I use it on occasion, since it will deflate 100+GB zip files much faster than 7zip will. (7z is single threaded for pkzips)

It's been more than a decade since I used it to compress anything though. LZMA2 rocks.

I'm glad you can have a Windows-free existence.

Some things just don't function well on Linux, but there are lots of us who are 99% Linux and don't use Windows unless we have to.

Does it matter when 7zip handles rar anyways?

Hey outlook, can you save all 15 attachments to this folder? The 15 attachments I can view in outlook? The 15 attachments that drag and drop out of the email into a folder as expected? The 15 attachments that I can individually save as expected to a folder?

"best I can do is a zip file for the whole batch"

That's how I know I'm home

FOSS users when there's a software that's free but not open source

What else did you expect from lemmy?

Same. I've happily used it for over 2 decades and decided that they actually deserve some money for that. I've since switched to Linux, but don't regret paying for WinRAR at all.

Ever since i found out that there is a yearly subscription for winrar on android, ive been paying for it.

I dont even use winrar anymore but it gives the same satisfaction as donating to wikipedia, and its just a few bucks so why not

Unlike 7-Zip, which is actually free and also open-source as well

7-Zip is by far the best archiving software on Windows

Absolutely nothing, plus 7zip can be faster with better compression.
Well, apparently it can do some recovery of corrupted .rar, but who uses that format anyway

Winrar is older, so it has more sentimental users

Nanazip is a fork of 7-zip that is better on Windows 11. Doesn't answer your question. Just making you aware

Not sure myself. Like many I used WinRAR back in the day, but it's been at least 15 years since I last installed it.

I think theyre still popular on Usenet.

IDK all the history but rar has built in ability to create recovery data / parity volumes.

Parity data is like additional data that can help reconstruct any degradation.

That said, usually a standalone parity generator is used which can work with other types of archives, but rar is what everyone uses so why change.

Compression algos are ineffective on encoded / compressed media anyway.

It used to be important on Usenet, and maybe still is, because if a drive starts to fail somewhere and contains errors those errors can be reproduced across the network. Not sure if thats still a thing or why but certainly 10 years ago it was.

The summary to this rambling comment is: some communities still like rar because its what they've always used and there's no benefit to adopting 7z.

You wrote 7zip wrong