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Windows 11 adds native support for RAR, 7-Zip, Tar and other archive formats
- vasdae 3y agoThe other day I opened a big tar file (which doesn't have an index, and therefore requires a full scan of the file in order to show a file list) with Windows Explorer and the Explorer window simply froze for minutes. (Correction: as a child comment says, it was gzipped tar, not plain tar)
- onemoresoop 3y agoYeah, windows is a disaster and windows 11 is complete garbage.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y agoYou're right, I've certainly never experienced a Linux system suddenly becoming unresponsive at any point.
- onemoresoop 3y agoI have but that's a different discussion altogether. Windows is an operating system that takes control away from user, privacy lacks, it's bloated with tons of garbage and so on. It may be okay for gaming but I'd use a separate partition for daily computing that isn't Windows
- SketchySeaBeast 3y agoOK, so the complaint was irrelevant to the conversation.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago[flagged]
- tentacleuno 3y agoTo be fair, I find Linux issues way easier to fix. It's still a huge piece of software I'll never have the joy of fully understanding (I doubt most of the kernel devs. understand everything in Linux), but for the most part I know what it likes.
- anon291 3y agoMy NixOS boxes have actually never frozen on me. Dozens of computers, 5+ years. No problems. Still run as good as when they were bought. Most Linux distros and Windows suffer from the same problem of state. Immutable OSes and systems basically fix this, and it's amazing. I'm happy to use a computer again.
- tentacleuno 3y agoTo be honest most of the issues I have with Linux are with the userspace subsystems that build on it; the kernel itself never seems to have many issues (aside from strange audio delays after waking from suspend, but I suspect Pipewire / the Bluetooth stack to be at fault due to it being generally annoying). Immutable computing sounds frickin amazing!!! Being able to check your entire system configuration into Git, and effectively re-build your OS setup at any time, is really something I want to explore this year.
- anon291 3y ago> Immutable computing sounds frickin amazing!!! Being able to check your entire system configuration into Git, and effectively re-build your OS setup at any time, is really something I want to explore this year. Yes, it really is amazing. My computer is amazing. I have been able to build intricate set ups that are immune to upgrades and such. I use a relatively complicated XMonad based set up right now, but because it's all in Nix, upgrades are a breeze. Yes, there is some trouble, but it's flagged before it happens or I can easily revert to the old system. This is the longest time I've gone without re-installing an OS (not that that would even be a big deal with Nix anyway, because a new install will be identical).
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago"Hurr...durr...windoze bad and Bill Gate killed my puppy" - Average karam farming HN user
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- seec 3y agoI really don't understand this kind of comment. I used to be a mac user only (still have a mac) and kind of hate on windows. But nowadays I use windows daily and I find it stable and mostly trouble free. Yes, there are some bugs, yes there are some annoyances. But it is super cheap, runs easily on a lot of hardware and can run games for hours on end with zero issue. I have gotten less blue screen / complete lockup than I have had kernels panics from macOS. I think the hate must be a stupid snob thing because while there are issues it is not like there is no issues on the competing OSs... Yes I am running Windows 11 ; on "unsupported" hardware !
- chungy 3y ago> which doesn't have an index, and therefore requires a full scan of the file in order to show a file list Well, not exactly _full_, unless you're talking compressed files. You can be smart and skip ahead to read the next file's metadata by knowing the current file's size. GNU tar and FreeBSD tar already do this; getting a listing of millions of files for a hundreds-of-gigabytes tar is nearly instant this way. Compressing the archive does throw a wrench into it. You'll have to decompress the whole thing in that case.
- Dennip 3y agoExplorer in Win11 (for me) is absolute hot garbage
- londons_explore 3y agoThe fact that shell extensions are source code compatible back to 1995 and binary compatible back to 2004 is probably the main reason... And back then, there wasn't really a strict API for extensions, so they just injected things into random places, and Microsoft, 28 years later, is still supporting that.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoThat's interesting I just opened a large tar archive to try to replicate your issue and it worked fine for me, no freezing.
- deaddodo 3y agoI mean, even if you did find a large archive that did this, the same would happen on Linux. The problem isn't the operating system here, it's that compressed tarballs don't include indices in their compressed form. You have to decompress (in-memory) then iterate the metadata.
- account42 3y agoThat's no excuse for freezing the UI.
- deaddodo 3y agoI'm going to guess that there is a status bar at the bottom, based on Windows GUI paradigms. But sure, it's not ideal. File-roller and Ark definitely do freeze up if you attempt to browse a large compressed tarball. Maybe greying out and showing the indefinite status bar is a better experience for you...but they're equally non-responsive.
- AaronMT 3y agoOf note: through File Explorer, the new formats only support extraction.
- henriquecm8 3y agoHonestly, I think that's okay, at least I only create .zip files, and when I do, it's just to send several files together. Only Power users care about the compression ratio, and they will install their favorite software anyway.
- accrual 3y agoTwo other common use cases I have for more advanced software like 7-Zip, beyond compression ratio, are the ability to select AES for encryption (vs the weak old school ZipCrypto) and the ability to tar things. Sometimes I don't want compression at all, so I'll tar instead, just because it's easier to work with one big file over many small ones. Tar is also convenient for beaming groups of files over netcat.
- deaddodo 3y agoYou can create zero compression zips in Windows Explorer. It's probably the most common use-case for their "create" step (people just creating a quick zip to send projects, etc to each other). But yes, if you specifically want a tarball you'll still need tar.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoDon’t forget the need to send “naughty” files through corporate email. If you attach a .py/.bat/must-be-a-virus-extension, the entire message can get silently blocked. Compressing it with a trivial password can be mandatory.
- jetbalsa 3y agoI love the fact in 7zip you can open disk images and it can read ext4 and other filesystems to extract files out of them and write files back into them
- czk 3y agoInteresting to note the use of libarchive to accomplish this, which also means very limited support for password-protected archives outside of zip.
- pm2222 3y agoI still prefer 7zip and its dual panes GUI manager.
- deaddodo 3y agoSo...use 7zip and it's GUI? This has no effect on your choice of a third-party application.
- deelowe 3y ago7zip has shell integration issues on win 11.
- deaddodo 3y agoWere those issues introduced with this feature or preexistenting?
- SquareWheel 3y agoThey were preexisting. 7-zip doesn't integrate with the new Windows 11 desktop context menu, so you need to click "Show more options" first which opens the old context menu.
- nirav72 3y agoEasy fix https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/restore-old-right-click-context-menu-in-windows-11/a62e797c-eaf3-411b-aeec-e460e6e5a82a https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/restor...
- 830192380123 3y agoAs an aside, NanaZip[0] is a 7zip derivative with better shell integration. Also available on winget [0] https://github.com/M2Team/NanaZip https://github.com/M2Team/NanaZip
- ooterness 3y ago
- hackerfactor1 3y agoI can understand zip, 7z, and tar. But RAR? My only experience with RAR files comes from malware and warez (illegally distributed software, often compromised). Perhaps my own experience is just biased.
- MisterBastahrd 3y agoYeah, that's why I hate shoes. Because people who commit crimes normally wear them.
- brianwawok 3y agoSame but fit me it’s socks OP: rar is very very common for anything made by a Linux computer.
- OskarS 3y agoWhat? In my experience, RAR is extremely un-Linux. It's not free software and not command-line friendly, and it seems mostly to be used by piracy weirdoes who need to split up files for uploading to newsgroups. If you're on Linux, you make .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 or something. Or .zip, I guess you see sometimes. But RAR? That's a windows people thing, in my experience.
- bandyaboot 3y agoAre you maybe thinking of tar?
- mikestew 3y agoI wouldn't know what to do with a RAR file on a Linux machine, and I've used Linux for over 20 years (and Unix before that? Don't even ask, youngster.) I mean, yeah, I'd figure it out; but I've not had the need. As sibling commenters said, you're probably thinking of .tar. Now that I run into a lot. :-)
- godshatter 3y agounrar x archive-name I probably installed it many years ago from the repositories. Now that linux gaming is so good I've been seeing 7z and rar being used for game mods a lot.
- jwells89 3y agoI wonder if this will fix built-in decompressor’s lack of multithreading. That’s actually why I’ve been installing 7-zip (which is multithreaded) on new Windows installs for the past several years: with the explosion of cores available in consumer hardware, the gulf in speed between single-threaded and multi-threaded is vast in this particular case. With my Ryzen 5950X tower 7-zip will have ripped through an archive while the built-in decompressor is still plodding along. The difference while not quite as large is still significant on CPUs with fewer cores like the 5900X and 12700k.
- ShamelessC 3y ago> That’s actually why I’ve been installing 7-zip You had to before, right? Otherwise you’d simply not be able to decompress RAR, 7z, etc.
- jwells89 3y agoMy usage of Windows since around 7 or so has consisted almost entirely of gaming, and with that use case it’s rare to encounter archives that aren’t regular old zip files. On macOS though, one of the first things I always install is The Unarchiver which similarly decompresses just about anything and readily makes use of available CPU cores. The various archive tools that come with every Linux distro are usually capable enough that I don’t need to install anything extra.
- ShamelessC 3y agoI'm not entirely sure I understand at this point. Is the built-in Windows decompresser not sufficiently parallel for your needs?
- fuzzy2 3y agoOh, but that isn’t the problem. It’s that the old ZIP support issues 1-byte reads exclusively. https://nitter.net/ericlaw/status/1399856554690715659 https://nitter.net/ericlaw/status/1399856554690715659
- gokhan 3y agoReminded me how i loved Arj back in the day, auto-splitting games to 1.44 disks to copy to friends' machines.
- xvilka 3y agoIf they really use libarchive, ARJ isn't supported by the library [1]. [1] https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/issues/1468 https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/issues/1468
- xvilka 3y agoRAR support is incomplete[1] in libarchive. I wish Microsoft would also help the library to improve the support, now they use it. [1] https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/issues/1426 https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/issues/1426
- mcpackieh 3y agoI really hope they fix this so I can stop converting cbr files to cbz.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoThey might claim it is too hard to fix and it requires PHDs to solve it, like they claimed with the whole windows terminal fiasco.
- kyriakos 3y agoAny details on Windows terminal fiasco you refer to?
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31284419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28743687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28743687
- tw1984 3y agoMicrosoft is still on the wrong path - they should stop developing the windows kernel and that boring WSL nonsense. Just use the linux kernel and build a nice desktop environment for it, they can call it Windows 2. Once that is done, you no longer has such "native support for RAR, 7-Zip, Tar and other archive formats" problem to start with.
- hardware2win 3y agoIsnt windows kernel in better technological shape than Linux? Stuff like wsl1, etc.
- delta_p_delta_x 3y agoIt's quite easy to tell when someone has little understanding of OS internals. They make comments like the above, and say Windows should get rid of what is pretty much its best feature, the NT kernel. NT was light years ahead of its time, and I daresay its threading, I/O, permissions, and driver models are in many ways superior to the competition. That userspace Windows sucks or is slow, is decidedly not a kernel problem.
- babypuncher 3y ago> Once that is done, you no longer has such "native support for RAR, 7-Zip, Tar and other archive formats" problem to start with. This distinction seems pretty silly since only tar actually comes with linux out of the box. Everything else requires you to install another software package, as has been the case on Windows for decades.
- pxc 3y ago1. There's no such thing as 'Linux out of the box'. 2. This is complete nonsense. Any desktop distro comes with support for a wide variety of archive formats in their archiving apps as well as their file managers. GNOME Archive Manager, KDE's Ark and File Roller all support literally dozens of formats. So do Dolphin (via KIO), Nautilus (via libarchive and/or GVFS), and Thunar (via its archive manager plugin which wraps various CLI tools). On the vast majority of Linux operating systems comparable to Windows (i.e., coming with a GUI), normal use has never required desktop users to manually install software just to open an archive. The only exception would be Windows gamers downloading warez for use under emulation in patent-encumbered archive formats for which archiving tools would not be legal to freely distribute in some jurisdictions.
- everyone 3y agoI've been thinking recently that I prefer an OS to have as few features as possible, but allow me to install the software I want.
- tored 3y agoIn theory that sounds like a great idea, however in practice it isn't, because all you have done is compiled your own custom made distro that no one else uses and benefits from, thus just a waste of time and resources.
- jchw 3y agoOf course Windows would integrate libarchive into the GUI, while Linux GUI applications still popen CLI archiver tools. This is a pet peeve of mine, but now it's just a bit sad. The majority of the work is done and it's open source, but... I don't think I've seen anyone integrating it.
- account42 3y agohttps://github.com/KDE/ark/tree/master/plugins/libarchive https://github.com/KDE/ark/tree/master/plugins/libarchive
- jchw 3y agoI stand corrected, but this is strange. Empirically I know that at least most of the time, tools are just phoning out to `unar`, because if I run into problems it becomes immediately obvious. I wonder if libarchive is/was just not good enough to handle most of the things.
- wslh 3y ago2023... BTW we had WinZip and PKWARE as customers thanks to Microsoft unsupported formats or integrations. Apple also does not support (in the UI) all popular compression methods natively.
- kevincox 3y agoI wonder if they are applying any sandboxing to libarchive? While it is fairly battle-tested it is still a huge chunk of C code opening often untrusted files. Plus many of the formats are likely rarely used and don't have the same scrutiny that the implementations of zip and tar do.
- dehrmann 3y agoMaybe it was a licensing thing, but this should have been in XP 20 years ago.
- Cyder 3y agoi use peazip on windows and Linux. supports all these and more.
- rekabis 3y agoI still absolutely detest mounting files as folders, regardless of whether or not they are archives. It just rubs me the wrong way. So I will continue to install 7Zip and completely disable any built-in handling of archive files.
- adl 3y agoJust a brief reminder: If you need to zip/unzip files from the command line on Windows, you can use BSD tar. I needed to write a script that zips a directory from the command line, and found out that Windows 10/11 and at least Server 2019 includes BSD tar by default! You can use it like this: 'C:\Temp>tar acvf backup.zip directory' So, no need to install any third-party zip/unzip CLI tool.