> may as well be comparing a tar file to a tar.zstd file in the same case. It's not exactly hard to get a new compressor on a *nix system. It's either in the r

> may as well be comparing a tar file to a tar.zstd file in the same case. It's not exactly hard to get a new compressor on a *nix system. It's either in the repos, or not so hard to compile. On non-nixes, there's usually a binary. Tarballs have not been limited to only tar.gz for a very long time, though a lot of people do choose to be conservative in how their distributed files are compressed. > When a 'hacker' (programmer) says 'zip file' they refer to the widely compatible implementation which is likely to work in any common implementation of archive handling software. You don't speak for every hacker, certainly not for me. If you're implementing ZIP these days and it's not, at the very least, capable of reading ZIP64 archives (forget about newer compression methods), then you're just creating obsolete software.