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

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 646 points – Windows 11 adds native support for RAR, 7-Zip, Tar and other archive formats thanks to open-source library
techspot.com

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

160

Still gonna use 7zip, the default Windows packing/unpacking interface is atrocious.

Honestly though if they just added "extract to {archivename}\" as a right click option it would cover more than 90% of my usage.

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 πŸ˜… except that I also sometimes use 7zip file manager via WINE because I like a GUI

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

I only see the "Extract All..." option which has been there for years and isn't what I want. If it just proceeded with the extraction and didn't pop up a window asking where to put it then we'd be in business, but as currently implemented it's an additional interaction to do the same thing.

Which is an incredible effort, very few software have an interface more atrocious than 7zip.

The UI is the main reason I actually paid for a WinRAR license.

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.

I wonder how long before I can send someone a .7z file without "hurr durr I can't open this".

Like, OpenDocument support exists in Office 2003 and I still encounter those who can't open a .odt file.

I just tell them to install 7zip. I'm not working around your inadequacy.

Serious question: why would one use .7z when .tar.gz and .tar.xz exist?

Why would you use any of them when zip exists?

For an average user they offer no advantage.

Zip has a worse compression ratio than 7z, and that's a disadvantage for the average user (for example, a user with an email attachment size limit that they need to stay under).

If Windows natively supports one of the better alternatives, there's no reason to keep using zip. It's a 30 year old format, and it's something that regular users will happily just go with whatever's default.

Not only does Zip have a worse compression ratio than 7z, but it even takes longer to make the zip due to the fact the windows zip program is single threaded.

I know for a fact .tar.xz offers the best compression rate for my use case.

Then you aren't an average user.

It also takes forever to pack.

I ran benchmarks for syslog compression/decompression, and ended up using plzip, which used lzma, just because it was the fastest decompression while still having only marginally worse ratio.

But it still takes forever to pack.

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

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 files pack and unpack more quickly than Zip files since the windows zip program is only single threaded.

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?

Pro tip: Tar knows what to do if you try to untar a tar.gz file. It Just Works(tm).

Yeah I know, and it's only useful rarely as if you can extract directly to the target, you don't need to have an intermediate copy (or do intermediate copying). Really nitpicking ofc.

Eh? 'tar xvf foo.tar.gz' is technically 2 steps I guess, but that's pretty well hidden from the user.

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.

.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.

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

Clearly you've never used Linux

Clearly you never needed that single file quickly from a 5gb and 12,000 files tgz archive.

Wtf are you on... It's literally just a way to turn a bunch of files into one. You can feed it into a makefile and make a single file installer like nothing. Apps are based on the concept. It's a key technology for all sorts of applications

It's so simple it works for anything, anywhere... It's like saying virtualization is cancer. It's often annoying when you have to interact with it directly, but everything we love is built on it

Tared compressed files are bad archives. You can't retrieve a single file without unpacking everything. You can't add new files or replace contents of existing files without unpacking and repacking everything. They are just very outdated and have poor design. There are no reasons to use them.

They're bad for storing files, but a great way to turn a folder into a file.

Installers don't need to be modified or used in part

Why do you continue talking about installers? That's not the reason people invented archives and compression.

Ok, you have this design, which every installer in the world uses. Some are more compressed, some are signed, some bootstrap a downloader - but at the end of the day, every downloadable installer uses the same basic concept. From Windows installers to dmg to flatpacks to app bundles - same basic idea.

A tarball is a bunch of files laid end to end, it's good for one thing and one thing only - treating a bunch of files as one. It's great at that... If you want to compress it, it's not context aware enough to let you decrepit them individually - they're encrypted as one file

It's a bad way to store compressed archived info, I'll grant you that, but it's a great way to share a program or library to reproduce a bunch of files that make no sense to handle individually.

For another example, what about the layers of a photo editing program? What about the individual tracks in a music editing program?

It's an incredibly useful pattern that is used in countless ways. It's simple, easy to implement, and used everywhere to great effect

Again, not the reason for archives.

... Do you think archives are just when you store old files on magnetic tape?

For fucks sake... That's what YOU think! And that's the problem! TAR is a shit archive format. Deal with it.

LMAO that makes so much sense. No wonder you got all weird when I brought up installers. You're picturing a file in a folder that contains something you want

There's a lot of kinds of archives.

Tarballs don't suck, they're just not for you. You can go back to your blissful ignorance of how often you've used a tarball seamlessly without realizing it happened, because someone else understood the upside of the tech

Office support also exists for the majority of editors so why not just use what people are used to?

Why not just send a zip?

There's no advantage to the receiver for either of these.

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...

1 more...
1 more...

Microsoft annonces an actually useful feature for Windows once in a blue moon basically. This is one of them.

But I still hate Windows.

It only took them 20 years to incorporate a handful of mainstream file formats as core features. Give them a medal.

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

Microsoft loves opensource. :P

While still using proprietary API and proprietary specs for hardware... you know the thing that gets in the way of FOSS operating systems.

Microsoft loves Azure, anything else is there to draw people in.

Like Google and pretty much every other tech giant.

Google are extremely keen on supporting open source when it hits their competitors but when it's about their own business they pretty much avoids ot. They took Linux and created Android... they the practically locked it down by moving more and more essentials into Play Services... which by some of reason isn't open source.

Guarantee that they contributed no code back

They host the biggest open source platform in the world for free. So they do plenty for the open source community.

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?

For history fans:

LZ77 and LZ78 are the two lossless data compression algorithms published in papers by [two Israelis named] Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv in 1977 and 1978... Besides their academic influence, these algorithms formed the basis of several ubiquitous compression schemes, including GIF and the DEFLATE algorithm used in PNG and ZIP.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ77_and_LZ78

This is great, but I honestly hate the way that windows treats zips like they are just folders on your computer when they are fundamentally different, and I want to do different things with them. Sure, it's nice to be able to browse the files inside, but I can do that with 7zip.

The whole point is most people don't want a third party app.

I also think for most users treating them as a normal folder makes complete sense.

Chances are you aren't the target audience of the default configuration of windows. It's aimed at people who have trouble checking their email.

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.

The problem being average people don't tend to understand what a zip file is, I regularly have to explain that you can't run an executable from a zip

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

Yes. How to change it?

Pay Microsoft to the point where they make more money from you than their current target audience.

Get the majority of computer users trained to the point of understanding how computers work.

Microsoft is just catering to their biggest market.

So does KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate, Pantheon... But i can fit them infinitely more to my taste than Windows Explorer-extension (aka Windows Desktop). Well, ok, not Gnome. Not without unsupported extensions. Gnome Foundation is almost as bad in their ignorance of userbase.

3 more...

It's nice when you can use the file browser of an app and I can open a file from a zip directly but I see your point.

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.

3 more...

That's pretty cool. Please give us our objectively-more-efficient taskbar layouts back and I'll consider "upgrading" my desktop?

When I was offered a free sample, win11 ran slower and controls were walled off from the control panel and access instructions were behind paywalls. Also some of my games wouldn't play.

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.

I am using windows 11 since the preview both for work (dev) and for gaming (although I switched to the steam deck as my main gaming platform) and don't remember any breaking or blocking bugs. On the contrary, using bluetooth headset got a lot better and easier with win11. Which bugs did you spot?

Ech, I didn't document them, and I don't have a great memory for things that change. The one I remember off the top of my head were the explorer.exe crashes several times a day, and the fact that the UI still behaves freaking weirdly.

7 wasn't really like that. It was more of a vista second edition.

7 was buggy when new like all the rest. I remember. Your argument is like saying that 10 wasn't buggy when new because it was 8 second-edition. But it was buggy.

8.1 was fairly not buggy it was equivalent to seven. Until Windows 11 Microsoft had alternated core updates and feature updates. So XP is a less buggy version of 2000, 98 had 98se. There are a couple outliers like me and Windows 10, but Windows 10 is kind of like 8.2, and they abandoned the dos based kernels so I me never got a second version

I'm curious, how is the centering of it any less efficient than left aligning it?

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

Yeah most people don't realize this

A lot of the supposed technology inclined people do, when it is literally 3 clicks and a scroll away in the most obvious place to look for it.

If they're incorporating open libraries, Hopefully support for real filesystems will be next

Humm, I doubt it as NTFS has ACLs built in to FS directly, so far I don't know if Linux FS has that feature, I know that ACLs exists in the Linux file world, but I don't know if they are built in durectly in the FS.

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

That is fair, I confused support with making windows run on them rather than being able to just read and write to them.

That is my mistake.

proof of concept installing windows on btrfs. It just requires an alternative bootloader

Very interesting, thank you for sharing, I thought NTFS was so ingrained in Windows that it could bot run on anything else.

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.

User/group/world scheme is useless in most cases.

Other file systems are supported since Win10.

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

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-mount-disk

not really scalable when you want to just stick the usb stick in a family member's PC. They dont want you fucking around with WSL, or they probably run home edition which has no hyper-v for WSL

Then use NTFS or FAT, problem solved!

Yes reformat my already working keys for the one time I have to plug into a Windows box, or you know Microsoft could put the effort into being compatible.

They did. But you always have something to complain about. Grow up.

of course! You're right! Suggesting in a thread discussing a large corporation that wants to be seen as pro open source (hearting Linux, buying github) for the last decade does something with open source code in their OS and being bold enough to do even more in the name of native compatibility is childish!

Another actually genuine useful update, so...

TIME TO BUY A WINRAR LICENSE!!!

Does it support password protected archives yet?

...and kids, this is why you (A)GPLv3 your code. Always.

I feel like this will only make life easier for everyone. I hate Windows as much as the next guy but this will help open archive formats be more accessible.

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.

On macOS, the default double click behavior just unzips the archive into a folder of the same name with no additional interface. I always thought that was a nicer implementation than opening the archive to browse the files how Linux distros usually do (and maybe Windows; I’m not a frequent Windows user). It’s probably what 90% of people want 90% of the time. Why not just make that the default and put the other use cases behind the right click menu?

Who unzips archives before you even know what's in it? That's madness.

You can do that in Windows and Linux (kde at least), it's just part of the right-click context menu, which makes far more sense to me.

Edit: I just remembered that a Mac mouse only has one button lol

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)

you seem angry. what's the difference between a folder and directory, theyre the same thing.

I'm not angry I'm older than Windows 95 which started that whole new-fangled "folder" thing for no reason whatsoever. And it's slowly infecting Unix, too.

...and at the same time they're still using dir to list... a folder?

A folder stores files and you look up the location of files within that folder with the help of a directory. It was a direct translation of physical concepts, such as the directory in the lobby of a building that tells you which floor and office a business is located.

Just because Windows mushed those definitions together doesn't mean that they're the same.

I often want to extract just a few files from an archive, so no.

Would that really be safe though? I wouldn't want everything to unzip without checking first what's inside.

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.

What about zip bombs?

I don't think zip bombs have been an issue for a long time now. That was an issue with archiving software that has been solved I think, unless you use bad software.

Windows does basically what you think it does.

And I'd rather it not unzip the contents of a file that I haven't looked at yet. I also sometimes only need one or two files from the zip folder and don't want to unzip the entire thing.

They updated the computers at work to W11 and they really fucked up the basic notepad app. It has tabs now and reopens my last draft instead of a new blank window.

And I'm still going to use WinZip anyway.

Install Linux already...

You have a point, but you're being insufferable about it.

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

Alright then, keep repeating it the way you do and see how people react to you, and how it reflects on the Linux community as a whole.

Perhaps you will gain the self-awareness necessary to actually understand why people are calling you insufferable.

You call me insufferable, you are not people and I'm at the point where I don't give a shit what a Microsoft apologist thinks. I had to reinstall operating systems this weekend, Linux for me, windows for my son. Linux was a breezy 30 minutes, including downloading the iso, writing the USB, and installing it with an encrypted drive.

Windows was a breezy 7 hours of cursing, slamming my keyboard, loads of internet searches because 1) windows is an incompetent system and 2) Microsoft loves to sabotage their users. I wish I was kidding.

This is not a one off, this is typical for a windows installation, I've been having to do this for decades, it's always shit.

It's a retarded system and people have been scammed into buying shit and they love it because they don't even know how bad it is.

I would not really care much directly, to each their own. If you love to pay tripple for bad quality (hardware and software) Shiny toys then go ahead, buy Apple! If you love to roll around in shit then buy windows! The problem though is that inevitably, all windows users come to me with their windows crap show because inevitably it will break over stupid shit, not tell the user (or me) what's actually wrong, it's always some weirdo UUID or base64 registry string that nobody can know that needs to be changed. Fuuuuuuck that shit. I'm so tired of always having to deal with windows shit.

If windows shots on me, I will shit on windows every chance I get.

So yeah, install linux!