More importantly, xz decompresses quickly. Essentially, you get the compression ratio of bzip2 at the decompression speed of gzip (and, unfortunately, the compr

More importantly, xz decompresses quickly. Essentially, you get the compression ratio of bzip2 at the decompression speed of gzip (and, unfortunately, the compression speed of bzip2). EDIT: also, like gzip but unlike bzip2, you can stream data through xz (at an insignificant penalty in compression ratio).