7zip is better anyway I don't understand why people still use WinRar. Then again I don't understand why people still use Windows either.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2026
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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.
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Or WinZip. I work for a company that literally has the licenses for every computer they own. Why? 7-zip is free.
I could think of stronger password protection options. Maybe some kind of UI. Maybe a way to certify creators of the zip so they can filter out malicious zips in emails. I dont know what WinZip offers but company compliance is a goldmine.
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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.
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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.
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ITT: The most politically charged discussion of compression software I've ever read...
That's how I know I'm home
FOSS users when there's a software that's free but not open source
I make software that’s almost “open source” with the only limitation being that you can’t resell it. I’ve had FOSS users tell me they’d prefer it being proprietary.
Surely thats just a couple of weirdos on the extreme side. Did that happen on multiple occasions?
Yeah, it happened many times, even across platforms (Reddit of course, but also Mastodon and Bluesky)
A lot of FOSS people consider my license almost “deceitful” because they think I actually hate FOSS and am having my code available only to pose as a “good” developer
What else did you expect from lemmy?
Israel uses 7zip to genocide LGBTQ children in Palestine running Arch btw
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I own a valid WinRAR license!
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.
You can still use it. WinRAR works on Linux with WINE
Oh God why though
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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
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anyone who still distributes anything compressed with winrar, please just fucking stop
use it for your personal archival purposes if you must, but please just fucking stop using it to share or distribute anything publicly. there's zero reason to use .rar over 7z or zip or tgz or any other open standard
Does it matter when 7zip handles rar anyways?
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Shhh you're a free software
Unlike 7-Zip, which is actually free and also open-source as well
7-Zip is by far the best archiving software on Windows
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Pay for independently-developed software if you care about it continuing to exist. Steal from corporations all you want. But support independent devs (and small teams) to make sure they can keep maintaining the tools you love and rely on. It's the only way to not get swallowed by the big dogs.
RAR files just make me "Huh?" as they are nowhere near as good as 7zip, as universal as zip, or as nice as tarballs.
The memory of multi-part rar files being a good way to get big things voer dial-up is kinda long past, they're a relic, in my book.
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.
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I've never used WinRAR. I'm a 7-zip ~~fanatic~~ user.
Its big companies that screw them the most. I have worked for multiple multi billion dollar corporations that will screw Team Viewer over even though its how we get customers into their down servers. And it wasn't one data center, its every data center I have ever worked in (30 years in)
If the license is free, they will screw them.
*I know TV hasn't been around that long, but WinRAR has been and it was another company I saw screwed.
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Makes sense. People finally have tons of disposable income to spread around. /S
Or maybe is just that everything else is so ridiculously expensive that WinRAR seems like a good deal now.
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