Not everything is a competition. If people want to support WinRAR after the developer maintained it for more than 30 years and helped out millions of people, that's just fine.

Or WinZip. I work for a company that literally has the licenses for every computer they own. Why? 7-zip is free.

I use it on occasion, since it will deflate 100+GB zip files much faster than 7zip will. (7z is single threaded for pkzips)

It's been more than a decade since I used it to compress anything though. LZMA2 rocks.

I'm glad you can have a Windows-free existence.

Some things just don't function well on Linux, but there are lots of us who are 99% Linux and don't use Windows unless we have to.

That's how I know I'm home

FOSS users when there's a software that's free but not open source

Same. I've happily used it for over 2 decades and decided that they actually deserve some money for that. I've since switched to Linux, but don't regret paying for WinRAR at all.

Ever since i found out that there is a yearly subscription for winrar on android, ive been paying for it.

I dont even use winrar anymore but it gives the same satisfaction as donating to wikipedia, and its just a few bucks so why not

Does it matter when 7zip handles rar anyways?

Unlike 7-Zip, which is actually free and also open-source as well

7-Zip is by far the best archiving software on Windows

I think theyre still popular on Usenet.

IDK all the history but rar has built in ability to create recovery data / parity volumes.

Parity data is like additional data that can help reconstruct any degradation.

That said, usually a standalone parity generator is used which can work with other types of archives, but rar is what everyone uses so why change.

Compression algos are ineffective on encoded / compressed media anyway.

It used to be important on Usenet, and maybe still is, because if a drive starts to fail somewhere and contains errors those errors can be reproduced across the network. Not sure if thats still a thing or why but certainly 10 years ago it was.

The summary to this rambling comment is: some communities still like rar because its what they've always used and there's no benefit to adopting 7z.