Windows 11 adds native support for RAR, 7-Zip, Tar and other archive formats thanks to open-source library::undefined
Still gonna use 7zip, the default Windows packing/unpacking interface is atrocious.
Honestly though if they just added “extract to {archivename}\” as a right click option it would cover more than 90% of my usage.
I love KDE’s “extract here, autodetect folder” feature for compressed files
that is why I still use dolphin
Literally the reason why 7 zip is the first thing I install on a windows machine.
All the linux file managers I use have that context menu built in, so nothing else to install 😅 except that I also sometimes use 7zip file manager via WINE because I like a GUI
Have you used Windows recently? This option currently exists as a right-click option in Windows 11.
I only see the “Extract All…” option which has been there for years and isn’t what I want. If it just proceeded with the extraction and didn’t pop up a window asking where to put it then we’d be in business, but as currently implemented it’s an additional interaction to do the same thing.
Check out NanaZip
Fun fact “nana” means 7 in Japanese.
I didn’t know that. Interesting spin
Its what i use now its really nice
Which is an incredible effort, very few software have an interface more atrocious than 7zip.
The UI is the main reason I actually paid for a WinRAR license.
I don’t use the interface, that’s the thing. I just use the contextual menu - which is more than enough to operate it easily. If the windows version of it had the same, then I wouldn’t mind at all.
Fair point.
God I’m so sick of Musk spa … wait, what? Actual technology news?
You are part of the problem by bringing it up where it isn’t relevant
Microsoft annonces an actually useful feature for Windows once in a blue moon basically. This is one of them.
But I still hate Windows.
It only took them 20 years to incorporate a handful of mainstream file formats as core features. Give them a medal.
Maybe they’ll get around to multithreaded (de)compression in another 20 years.
The medal will be made of copper.
As someone who has daily driven Linux on all my devices for about 5 years now, I actually forgot that windows didn’t have built in rar, tar and 7zip support. Absolutely bonkers that it took them this long.
they dont even have (s)ftp support built into their file explorer
And Windows still balks at most common filesystems.
They actually removed the old FTP support, it was somewhat still useful for local servers that didn’t have samba shares.
To be fair, Windows now has better support than Gnome does natively. I wish they would finally give nautilus seamless archive integration…
Watch as they break it even more. They broke drag and drop between archives and nautilus a while ago and it remains broken to this day.
Does this means I can stop using lha? /s
Guarantee that they contributed no code back
They host the biggest open source platform in the world for free. So they do plenty for the open source community.
Github? You mean the one that used a legally questionable AI that borrows code from projects with licenses that don’t allow you to do so under certain circumstances?
For history fans:
LZ77 and LZ78 are the two lossless data compression algorithms published in papers by [two Israelis named] Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv in 1977 and 1978… Besides their academic influence, these algorithms formed the basis of several ubiquitous compression schemes, including GIF and the DEFLATE algorithm used in PNG and ZIP.
/thread
Top tier comment
The last two Israeli that did something useful for the society.
This isn’t true.
You can count hundreds here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Israeli_inventions_and_discoveries
Oh wow! My post was a joke, but I just learnt the usb thumb drive is an Israeli invention, that’s wild.
This is great, but I honestly hate the way that windows treats zips like they are just folders on your computer when they are fundamentally different, and I want to do different things with them. Sure, it’s nice to be able to browse the files inside, but I can do that with 7zip.
The whole point is most people don’t want a third party app.
I also think for most users treating them as a normal folder makes complete sense.
Chances are you aren’t the target audience of the default configuration of windows. It’s aimed at people who have trouble checking their email.
It’s aimed at people who have trouble checking their email.
Opening ZIP natively in folder app really is just user friendly practices. Ofc it’s easier to able to browse its content that way.
You shouldn’t need 3rd party software for things that simple.
The problem being average people don’t tend to understand what a zip file is, I regularly have to explain that you can’t run an executable from a zip
You can though, Windows just prompts you to extract it if needed and it’s all fairly user friendly.
Chances are you aren’t the target audience of the default configuration of windows.
Yes. How to change it?
Pay Microsoft to the point where they make more money from you than their current target audience.
Get the majority of computer users trained to the point of understanding how computers work.
Microsoft is just catering to their biggest market.
So does KDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate, Pantheon… But i can fit them infinitely more to my taste than Windows Explorer-extension (aka Windows Desktop). Well, ok, not Gnome. Not without unsupported extensions. Gnome Foundation is almost as bad in their ignorance of userbase.
Maybe they’re like that because they’ve been trained that way by shit software
deleted by creator
What distro do you use which thinks an archive file needs executable permissions?
Alternatively, what distro / file explorer can’t recognize the MIME types for archives (which has nothing to do with permissions but it’s the only relevant error that makes sense)?
What are you even talking about? Archives have been so much easier to use on Linux for many years, because that headline was built-in.
It’s nice when you can use the file browser of an app and I can open a file from a zip directly but I see your point.
Yeah, it’s probably best for most users, but I just personally prefer to treat them separately so I know what I’m dealing with.
That’s pretty cool. Please give us our objectively-more-efficient taskbar layouts back and I’ll consider “upgrading” my desktop?
When I was offered a free sample, win11 ran slower and controls were walled off from the control panel and access instructions were behind paywalls. Also some of my games wouldn’t play.
Me also can’t stand the changed control panel UI. Most of the times I just hit WIN+R and type “control”
I have Windows 11 on my laptop but 10 on my desktop. 11 was a mess and is still a mess. Don’t get me wrong, 10, 8, 7, and Vista were that way too for like a year or two. But I feel like a lot of 11’s problems are not going to be solved by bug-fixing.
I am using windows 11 since the preview both for work (dev) and for gaming (although I switched to the steam deck as my main gaming platform) and don’t remember any breaking or blocking bugs. On the contrary, using bluetooth headset got a lot better and easier with win11. Which bugs did you spot?
Ech, I didn’t document them, and I don’t have a great memory for things that change. The one I remember off the top of my head were the explorer.exe crashes several times a day, and the fact that the UI still behaves freaking weirdly.
7 wasn’t really like that. It was more of a vista second edition.
7 was buggy when new like all the rest. I remember. Your argument is like saying that 10 wasn’t buggy when new because it was 8 second-edition. But it was buggy.
8.1 was fairly not buggy it was equivalent to seven. Until Windows 11 Microsoft had alternated core updates and feature updates. So XP is a less buggy version of 2000, 98 had 98se. There are a couple outliers like me and Windows 10, but Windows 10 is kind of like 8.2, and they abandoned the dos based kernels so I me never got a second version
I’m curious, how is the centering of it any less efficient than left aligning it?
When the start menu was left aligned, you can move you mouse infinitely to the lower left and still click it irrespective of the initial location of the mouse (There is a term for this concept in UX design called infinite space or similar). For similar reasons, the close (x) button is in the upper right corner.
However with the start menu in the center, you have to accurately place the mouse on the start icon and there cannot be a muscle memory since the movement depends on the initial location.
I believe this is Fitt’s Law
Also you can left-align win 11
Yeah most people don’t realize this
A lot of the supposed technology inclined people do, when it is literally 3 clicks and a scroll away in the most obvious place to look for it.
Install Linux, done.
Maybe if you leave the comment in a few more places, you’ll contribute something
Will do, thanks
Guess it’s time to finally buy a WinRar license
Another actually genuine useful update, so…
TIME TO BUY A WINRAR LICENSE!!!
Guess now pirates have to standardise on a new proprietary format.
If they’re incorporating open libraries, Hopefully support for real filesystems will be next
Humm, I doubt it as NTFS has ACLs built in to FS directly, so far I don’t know if Linux FS has that feature, I know that ACLs exists in the Linux file world, but I don’t know if they are built in durectly in the FS.
Pretty much all Linux FS support ACLs and have for an eternity.
The thing is that nobody uses ACLs because the good ole user/group/world rwx scheme is much less of a hassle to work with in 99.9% of the cases and the remaining 0.01% can still be done.
User/group/world scheme is useless in most cases.
How would it be any different to the various FAT filesystems it supports now?
That is fair, I confused support with making windows run on them rather than being able to just read and write to them.
That is my mistake.
proof of concept installing windows on btrfs. It just requires an alternative bootloader
Very interesting, thank you for sharing, I thought NTFS was so ingrained in Windows that it could bot run on anything else.
Other file systems are supported since Win10.
tell that to my btrfs formated USB sticks or when I try to access an ext4 partition from a windows machine
not really scalable when you want to just stick the usb stick in a family member’s PC. They dont want you fucking around with WSL, or they probably run home edition which has no hyper-v for WSL
Then use NTFS or FAT, problem solved!
Yes reformat my already working keys for the one time I have to plug into a Windows box, or you know Microsoft could put the effort into being compatible.
They did. But you always have something to complain about. Grow up.
…and kids, this is why you (A)GPLv3 your code. Always.
I feel like this will only make life easier for everyone. I hate Windows as much as the next guy but this will help open archive formats be more accessible.
I understand the sentiment, but I do not come to the same conclusion that of increasing accessibility via offering more features in unfree proprietary software. The intended consequences of this were publicised by US Justice Department in their uncovering of Microsoft’s memo labelled Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish which outlines how this eventually leads to less, not more, accessibility.
That aside, Microsoft Windows already supported ZIP which is an open standard. The addition of RAR, which is a proprietary unfree standard, is actually less open.
They updated the computers at work to W11 and they really fucked up the basic notepad app. It has tabs now and reopens my last draft instead of a new blank window.
On macOS, the default double click behavior just unzips the archive into a folder of the same name with no additional interface. I always thought that was a nicer implementation than opening the archive to browse the files how Linux distros usually do (and maybe Windows; I’m not a frequent Windows user). It’s probably what 90% of people want 90% of the time. Why not just make that the default and put the other use cases behind the right click menu?
Who unzips archives before you even know what’s in it? That’s madness.
You can do that in Windows and Linux (kde at least), it’s just part of the right-click context menu, which makes far more sense to me.
Edit: I just remembered that a Mac mouse only has one button lol
Most importantly on KDE you have “extract archive here, autodetect subfolder”. Having Ark be a different program than Dolphin is also the right choice as archives aren’t directories.
Also if you ever fucking make a tarball that doesn’t have a top-level directory and exactly one directory at the top level everyone officially hates you.
(And yes for some unfathomable reason kde calls directories folders)
you seem angry. what’s the difference between a folder and directory, theyre the same thing.
I’m not angry I’m older than Windows 95 which started that whole new-fangled “folder” thing for no reason whatsoever. And it’s slowly infecting Unix, too.
…and at the same time they’re still using
dir
to list… a folder?A folder stores files and you look up the location of files within that folder with the help of a directory. It was a direct translation of physical concepts, such as the directory in the lobby of a building that tells you which floor and office a business is located.
Just because Windows mushed those definitions together doesn’t mean that they’re the same.
I often want to extract just a few files from an archive, so no.
Would that really be safe though? I wouldn’t want everything to unzip without checking first what’s inside.
I don’t think it’s in any way unsafe, unless something is very wrong with the in-archiving software, in which case viewing it would likely have the same vulnerability. Files existing I don’t think can cause any harm, again without some severe vulnerability somewhere along the chain. Running them is the issue.
What about zip bombs?
I don’t think zip bombs have been an issue for a long time now. That was an issue with archiving software that has been solved I think, unless you use bad software.
Windows does basically what you think it does.
And I’d rather it not unzip the contents of a file that I haven’t looked at yet. I also sometimes only need one or two files from the zip folder and don’t want to unzip the entire thing.