Like when you send a .7z instead of a .zip or .rar to a friend or a teacher because that’s what your computer has installed and they’re like “Oh No, not one of those, now I have to install 7Zip” even though the same program that opens .rar also opens .7z I feel like people are way more annoyed when they receive a .7z
No?
I just used 7Zip to compress to a .zip file when sending to anyone who I supect is tech illiterate.
Now I’m on linux, I don’t even know what application is doing the compressing, I just right click stuff in dolphin to compress/uncompress things using whatever format is suitable.
and people still think linux is hard
It can be. But pick a stable distro, and as long as you get past installation, you’ll be set.
I put Vanilla OS on my sister’s laptop, showed her the “app-store” (flatpak) and she’s been happily minecrafting and firefoxing ever since.
Yeah my mom’s 80 and her laptop runs Ubuntu. For the day to day stuff it’s dead simple, I haven’t had to do “tech support” for her in years
To be fair, someone with a more basic grasp of computers probably has fewer use cases that Linux will give you trouble with. I installed PuppyLinux on some ancient machine for someone I was renting from in like '08 and it was fine for her, but that’s because all she ever did was look at YouTube and check her email. It didn’t have any of the features of modern Ubuntu and the UI was clunky; if memory serves it didn’t even have DHCP.
It worked fine for basic browsing, but if you tried to do anything more complex, you’d better be ready to learn a thing or two.
Today it’s still pretty similar. Ubuntu and GNU at large have come a long way in the past couple of decades, but you still start running into issues when you get to more niche use cases.
I’d probably be running Ubuntu as my daily if Solaar worked properly with my MX Ergo, but it doesn’t, so I can’t. I guess I could go learn how to make contributions to patch that myself, and I may at some point, but at the moment I have stuff to get done and dealing with an unexpected hiccup in my workflow too often brings everything to a grinding halt.
What does it mean to not have DHCP? Does that mean you need to either pray the router is ok with you squatting on an IP, or you need to explicitly tell the router an IP will be reserved?
You had to manually configure your IP on the PC’s end. In practice it just meant you had to hit a button to connect to your network when you boot up. Considering that like a decade earlier we were all on dialup it didn’t feel that weird at the time.
I was also getting my internet via cantenna back then, so DHCP was the least of my worries!
Normally it means that people have to set their network IP when they connect their device since they are not automatically assigned one. If the IP is taken, the router will tell you. If you don’t set an IP, the connection will simply fail. You are basically forcing every device in your network to have a static IP.
The upside is that you don’t have changing IPs in your network. I use my phone to control Kodi on my RPi and if I didn’t force a static IP on it, I would have to search for the Kodi host probably every time I restart the RPi.
Most routers and host clients do support IP reservation while still having DHCP enabled tho, so disabling DHCP is not really necessary these days. It wasn’t so smooth 20 years ago tho.
Yeah that’s a good point, the simple stuff will surprisingly enough tend to be simple
I did this, picked a stable distro (Ubuntu) and had endless problems. Each time I was told that I just picked the wrong distro (and they recommended a different one each time), or that I shouldn’t want to do what I wanted to do, or that it’s my fault for not having compatible hardware, or that if I want something I should just code it myself. Switched back to Windows eventually. Linux is great for server but I wouldn’t touch it again on desktop.
Enjoying life in 2003?
Damn, when was this? I can’t remember the last time I installed Linux on a machine and had this experience.
I understand the frustration. Except the point about hardware. I mean, yeah, of course you need to pick hardware that’s compatible with the OS you want to run. Can we blame HP for not being compatible with macOS, or an iPhone for not running Android? Hardware needs drivers, so if your hardware isn’t compatible, that’s just… reality. 99% of the time I hear this complaint it’s either a wifi card or an Nvidia GPU lol
Earlier this year. I was using a thinkpad x1 carbon laptop, supposedly a good laptop for that but still had problems. I was using an nvidia gpu, granted and one of my issue was related to WiFi
Majority of my problems have by solved by not having Nvidia graphics. Personally Linux has been great at extending the life of old computers for me. Linux mint runs a million times faster than windows 10 on my old machines. But it also helps I am fairly tech literate so problems that come up don’t register as a bif of a deal to me compared to others.
Yeah, I was using nvidia graphics so a lot of my issues were definitely caused by that.
When was this? When I finally went full time a year ago, compatibility and ease of use had improved greatly since the previous time I tried to leave Windows. And it sounds like the people giving you advice were gate-keeping assholes.
Any distro can install and run any software, choosing one is really just a matter of getting something that is already as close to the config you want as possible.
Not to discount your experience, but you’re only one data-point. The vast majority, in my experience, encounter few, if any, issues. And the ones they do can be solved by someone who knows even just the basics of linux. I’ve made the jump on several systems, for myself and other users.
A lot of windows know-how is useless, and linux newbies who are used to windows may look for solutions in the wrong places, and hence don’t find any. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or are more complex than on windows. I did this myself, bashing my head on problems with simple solutions, simply because I didn’t know those solutions. Windows would seem pretty “complex” too if you didn’t know the control panel exists, or what it’s for.
For windows, the know-how for solving problems is simply more accessible. If you don’t know someone who can help with linux, and don’t want to learn, then yeah, by all means, stick to windows.
But linux can absolutely be a good experience on desktop. And who knows, any given person can give it a try, and chances are, their system wont run into any issues at all!
This was earlier this year. Last time I tried it before that was in 2013 and I had heard that Linux had advanced a lot since then so was hopeful for giving it a try. I think you’re right to a degree that I don’t have as many issues with Windows because I know how to fix most issues there. However, one of the first issues I ran into on Linux was trying to increase the scroll speed on my mouse and searching showed me the only solution was a 3rd party program that listens for scroll events and just doubles them up which was far from ideal.
That’s because the kinda people who push Linux irl still tend to be the arch/Gentoo/random niche distro kinda people.
That’s why I don’t even recommend it to people anymore. Over the years I’ve lost track of all the distros and I wouldn’t even know what to tell someone to install.
Honestly, I’m not a Linux person. I’ve been thinking about it, however I’m being held back by the fact that I think some of the software I use probably wouldn’t work in Linux, even with wine or proton. I know, I know, I can dual-boot Linux with windows, however really I don’t really want to fuck around with having to reboot everytime I want to use Substance Painter (rip Substance for Linux, if it weren’t for that I’d be dipping my toes in again) or some niche game modding tool that doesn’t play well with
emulationcompatibility layers. Also I have an Nvidia card because there’s a ton of support for Cuda (but not a lot of support for amd compatible GPU compute apis), and I’ve heard those don’t usually play well with Linux.If I had to choose a distro to recommend for a non-techy person though, it’d probably be something like Mint or Ubuntu, and I’d make sure wine and/or proton is installed. Additionally, I’m not sure if wine or proton have the ability to setup a config database (it’s been a long time since I tried to use Linux), but I’d also setup something like that with all the most commonly used configs so that whenever a new program is launched in wine/proton, it searches the DB and then uses whatever config is set to be “the best”. That way grandpa can install and play his hoyle card game or whatever without having to call me over every time he wants to use something new (though I’ll be honest, he’d probably do that anyway because it’d be a reason to spend time with me, sorry grandpa :c).
(Edited because I realized I used the wrong term, pls don’t burn me at the stake Linux nerds)
My reasons are almost the exact same as yours. CUDA, software compatibility, and not wanting to mess with dual boot in case I mess up. I ended up trying linux mint on an external drive and it works pretty well, but I don’t think I see myself using this full time beyond software development.
I swapped to Ubuntu after windows 7 (refused to use 8/10). I find it much easier to work with than windows, but Ubuntu is the only distro I’ve used.
I’m not really an advanced user; I do some minor self hosting, and sometimes enjoy looking into new functionalities, but I’m not a huge computer person at all. Ubuntu worked perfectly well once I got the display driver issue sorted.
Holy shit is drive/file management sleek as fuck, especially if you move drives frequently. The disc management gui was just what it needed to be. The bulk rename utility being a standard, and easy as hell to use, was so so so fucking helpful, especially fixing all 26 seasons of original doctor who (each season is broken down into several miniseries, and were named like S01E01P01, S01E01P02, so not a workable naming scheme for Plex).
I learned a bunch of terminal commands because I like command line, it’s just more transparent and easier in the long run. Learned to add my software’s repositories for updates, which was super nice. But it’s a super nice and easy OS, and learning stuff in general was pretty optional.
The mobo died and I replaced the whole thing with a cheap win 11 computer. I can’t stand it and will be rebuilding my beast. Once my self-host servers are properly migrated to Linux, I’ll format the windows one to throw a different distro on to play with as my daily use computer.
I got a machine to set up as a media server and it had Windows preloaded. I’m a Windows user primarily and after an hour I got the shits and installed Mint. Command line installing is so much simpler.
The hard part is happening to only own hardware that has software supporting it that isn’t out of date. That and a lot of gaming.
It would be more correct to say some gaming. I don’t even check if games work anymore before buying, I just assume that they do, and so far they have.
Yeah at this point it’s mostly those games with heavy DRM and/or anti-cheat that don’t work properly on Linux. Proton has done wonders for compatibility otherwise.
Ehh, I would take those Proton ratings with a grain of salt. I’ve definitely run into issues trying to run stuff that’s supposed to be silver or gold. But again it all comes down to what your specific use case is. Hardware, software, peripherals, and goals and preferences.
I don’t even look at the ratings. I just buy games and play them. What would I do with a grain of salt?
Lick it.
Go out of your way to compress files into tar.gz to freak the normies
Compress a tar.gz into a 7z into a rar into a zip
Then StuffIt.
The power of the matrix, in the palm of my hand.
You monster!
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I always send a targz first and only upon request will I send anything else
Could be worse: I was all for the .ARJ church back then. LHA was also considered
Trading disks back in high school we’d exclusively use arj, and intentionally roll the “r” sound because arrrrrj 🏴☠️
I did that once. They didn’t even notice. Really bummed me out. To be fair, it was after I had them install 7Zip, so the fault is mine. Haha
no, I’m civilized. I use .tar.zstd
I love sending this to my windows friends
Windows 11 will soon support .tar.zst/.tar.bz2/.rar/.7z and a bunch of other formats.
If your friends are running the dev/insider branches of Windows, their computer already opens these folders as if they’re .zip files.
saaame
use 7zip zstd!
Cool kids use .tar.xz
whats so good about those
A few features of how tar archives work:
- Compression is completely independent of the file bundling process, so it’s easy to recompress or convert without potential loss of information.
- Compression works on the whole archive, so it can achieve better compression ratios if you’re compressing a bunch of text files as it just sees it as one big file
- tar archives are streamable: you can decompress and extract the files live as they’re being downloaded, or uploaded.
- tar archives can preserve permissions and user/group association, although that’s only really relevant on Linux/macOS/*BSD.
- You can copy them easily to tape drives
- It’s all open standards that are widely supported by most software, so unlike a rar or 7z, you’re pretty sure people will be able to extract those no matter what OS they use.
Fun examples of how this can all come together:
- Download a file from the Internet with curl, pipe it into the decompressor on my computer and then pipe to a Raspberry Pi over SSH and then pipe it into tar to extract it directly on it without ever needing an intermediate step as the target device have barely enough space on it to fit all the files.
- Clone a computer: tar up the whole drive, pipe that over the network to a better computer which compresses it, then pipes it to both a hard drive for archival and then split it to send it to multiple computers who will decompress and extract it to their own hard drive, and voilà you have 5 clones of the computer and a backup copy of what you just did with zero intermediate steps slowing the process down.
In practice, you double click your .tar.gz and it opens in your preferred archiver and it’s no different than a zip file.
It is rather useful to be able to do all of that on the fly though, especially when you’re shipping GBs and you may not have enough space to store both the original files and the archive you’re creating.
Awesome thanks for the all this info!
you can pipe a shell command directly into the archive. they’re also a standard archive format understood by most computers on earth.
or maybe this was a joke reply.
Use .arc for old time’s sake.
Just make a zip, you clown.
If they complain about about a .7z file send them a .tar.gz file.
Break out goold old .ace just to fuck with em.
Then split that into a few hundred 1.36mb file segments and send them along with a handful of par files. Not par2, just par.
And then put that in a tarball
Also make sure you divide it into multiple files, and add a password.
Wait, people still use RAR?
I mean, I paid for winrar sooo…
Oh that was you?
You are the one!
No you didn’t Mr Simpson, no one did.
I got a rar file for work a few weeks ago and had the same thought. ‘RAR is still a thing!?!?’
for work
That doesn’t count, businesses will continue to use whatever they have instead of upgrading if it’s still fit for purpose.
see also COBOL
see also COBOL
“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the
abyssCOBOL, theabyssCOBOL gazes also into you.”
They’ve certainly become a lot more…
Nope, not gonna do it.
Come on man, you think of how many Dads you’d make proud.
Just edit the comment
You know you want to
embrace the daditude, OP
RAR5 is a nice format with a very good compressor. More efficient than 7z. However I believe 7z with lzma2 can be tuned for a better compression ratio when throwing a lot of RAM and CPU on the problem. But for day to day usage, I prefer the speed of RAR.
“Oh No, not one of those, now I have to install 7Zip,” said no one ever.
7-Zip is excellent. It’s the de facto standard archiving and compression tool on Windows, and for good reason.
I work in a place where the computers are very locked down. You cannot install anything of your own. You always have to go through the helpdesk, which can take a few days to resolve your ticket. We have 7zip installed by default but if that was not the case, this could easily be a problem. Sending stuff as .zip is always the safest way if you don’t know what environment your recipient is using.
Why does it take days?
There’s usually an entire approval process every software request goes through. First it needs a legit business use case that one of our current approved pieces of software cannot do. For example, they may not let you install Chrome because they officially support Edge since it’s heavily tied into the Microsoft ecosystem, and therefore don’t want to deal with managing Chrome in the environment.
If it’s a new piece of software, then it goes through a security review through the security team. Verify there’s nothing in it that oversteps it’s bounds, has no known security vulnerabilities, comes from a respectfully company that hasn’t done things like tax evasion, things like that. After security approves it then legal has to review the EULA or any licensing agreements. Company lawyers don’t really like doing this because it can be time consuming and low on their priority list.
After it’s approved, including any potential costs that the responsible parties accept, the operations team has a go at it. They don’t want to have to manually install it and maintain it on your computer, so they package it up and test it in a testing environment. After verifying the package can be deployed, configured, and kept up to date, or even completely removed remotely, then it gets put in to the production deployment, and finally sent to install on your machine.
Keep in mind that these employees are also doing all their other daily tasks. They’re not sitting there churning out app deployment packages. Maybe they only meet once a week for 30 minutes to approve software, and maybe they ran out of time before your request made the agenda. Maybe the security team held up on it because they had to deal with an emergency.
This is why some big companies can take a lot longer to get software approvals compared to places with one or two techs in the IT department.
Big companies are slow.
I like that your comment is the tl;dr for the above comment
I’ve said that.
Was going to check a file another student sent me. I was at school, so I used one of the school computers. These computers are locked down, which means I can’t install whatever I want on them. Needless to say, I was unable to open the 7z file the other student sent me until I got home. So much time wasted.
Pretty sure 7z has a portable edition you can just download and run without installing.
I would imagine downloaded exe files are also blocked.
The only annoying thing is setting up file association with 7zip. Why have the devs not made sure that it’s a simple task?
In reality they say “what is .7z?”
You can make zips using 7Zip. I use 7zip and send Zips to other people, but use 7z compression for my own files. Zip files are more ubiquitous and readily opened by most OS; certainly Windows opens them natively, and I assume MacOs does.
Of course it also depends what you’re sending. I wouldn’t send secure files in just a zip even with encryption due to zips flaws. I would use 7z eoth encryption as a minimum, and more secure methods depending on how valuable the data is.
The problem with zip is that Windows can’t open every zip file.
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No, Linux and Mac can open ZIP as easily as anything besides TGZ.
RAR is proprietary. Sending someone a RAR archive for compatibility reasons is like having sex with them for virginity reasons.
I usually go with zip. It’s supported by default on all sane operating systems. There’s no reason to overly complicate things for other people. No one is going to be impressed by your choice of compression format.
except, when you actually need the compression part
Which is not an issue in 99% of the cases
Right? Elitism in this thread is strong. I have never been in a situation where I NEED to use 7z instead of zip.
Unix (including Linux and BSD) tend to prefer tar. I have seen many Unix systems without zip support, but have yet to find one that does not have tar, even imbedded systems with just a few megs of disc and ram have tar
If they choose to use some obscure Unix system as their daily driver then it’s on them. Unless they specifically request tar or some other format, go with the safest option, which is zip.
Just send a zip dude. You said yourself 7zip can already handle them. You’re pointlessly making others install an application because of your personal preference hehe
.rar is an awful proprietary format that needs to die, and die soon. You should NEVER use .rar files when sending files to others due to its closed proprietary nature.
.zip is preferable because everyone can handle it by default. 7z is OK because nearly everyone can handle it by default and it is an open format.
I never apologize for my chosen file format. If they can’t read it, they don’t deserve it.
Best regards,
.tbz gang.tar.zst is my go-to nowadays. .txz if I need wide compatibllity.
Just drive over to their house with a USB drive. Problem solved!
To transfer 1tb of data from London to Edinburgh at 100mbit/s it would take around 22 hours.
To put a 1tb SSD in a rucksack and get the train to Edinburgh drop it off and come back would take about 9 hours.
Lol company I work at unironically has this as a suggestion for securely transfering sensitive data instead of cloud stuff. Although I think it’s more of “please learn how to use our secure server, I’m begging you” thing.
never underestimate the bandwidth of a van full of hard drives
3.5" hard drives have a physical volume of about 0.0107 cubic feet. A Chevy Express has a cargo volume of 239.7 cubic feet. Assuming that only 200 cubic feet can be effectively used, roughly 18,000 hard drives can be loaded into the van. If each hard drive is a 22TB Western Digital (largest mass available to consumers), that’s 396,000TB of data. Let’s assume a travel distance of 2 hours in the van, with an extra 4 hours on each end for unloading/loading. That’s 396000TB per hour/6600TB per minute/110TB per second. Most wireless connections are measured in mega/gigabits (not bytes) per second, so that’s 880Tb per second. This is far faster than any wireless connection available, even with much longer travel and unloading times. We can therefore conclude that a van full of hard drives has very good bandwidth.
*station wagon **tapes
In high school usb drives werent yet a thing so we had a SneakerNet using an Iomega Zip Disk.
7zip creates ZIP files too, I have that at work. Are you trying to make people think you are smarter or something?
Zip is a standard format, there’s a reason for having standardized workflows and no one should be punished for using those. If I primarily use 7z I’d still send zip archives like you said.
Make things easy for people around you
I mean 7z is standardized and open source, and offers better compression. Why not make it the standard?
No, I don’t expect anyone to open up a 7z. Why would I do that to someone? It just makes more work for everyone.
I use 7z myself but if the files go out I convert to zip for the benefit of my own time and also theirs.
Agreed, the purpose of sending someone a file is so they can use it, so you should send it to them in whatever format makes that happen most easily. Is it more important for you to spend your and their time collaborating on the content, or is it more important to evangelize a different compression format?
