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[–] 18 points 2 years ago (7 children)

I haven't used windows in about 15 years on my personal machines but see 7zip referenced everywhere...why is it so popular? Can windows 10/11 or whatever we're on now not compress/extract most things itself or do people prefer it for some reason (nice interface etc)?

I'm always amazed when I'm following a tutorial written for windows and it says "download and install 7zip, then extract the file using 7zip". I just right click the file and extract it...

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  • [–] 49 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Windows only recently got support for 7z and RAR. For the several decades before that, it supported neither.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    Recently? Feels like it's been more than a decade now...I could be wrong though

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Windows can do that, but opens archives as folders and will run executables by extracting them to a temp folder without dependencies. And the unpack dialogue is cumbersome, with 7zip you get a simple right click -> extract here / to folder dialogue, that somehow still is too much to ask of the main OS.

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