Adding a new compression format is some work, but apt (like most package managers) supports a range of compression formats and you don't have to do anything to

Adding a new compression format is some work, but apt (like most package managers) supports a range of compression formats and you don't have to do anything to tell it to use a different one; it figures it out from the package archive file itself. The dpkg patches required to add zstd support for .deb packages are pretty small, but they've also languished in Debian for a couple years.[1] But Debian's bureaucracy seems especially slow to move, and in general this kind of issue (inefficient compression in a packaging format) is not the kind of issue Linux distros suffer the worst from. Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, NixOS, GuixSD, Solus, and Void Linux are all already using zstd compression for OS installation, packaging, or both. That pretty much covers your bases for downstream distros and also oddball, niche things. openSUSE will presumably switch to using zstd compression for packaging when they change defaults from zypper to dnf for their high-level package manager. A lot of Linux package managers just use FreeBSD's libarchive for all of their compression needs, which covers a ton of formats. Presumably Apple could do the same with their imaging tools. — 1: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=892664 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=892664