alt Hacker Newsxz is pretty universal across POSIX and clones though. It comes with any modern Linux distro, Busybox even has an .xz decompressor, so `tar xvJF file.tar.xz` does the right thing in *NIX land, which I presume includes MacOS with Brew.
For Windows systems, 7-zip (.7z, similar compression to .xz) is a free download for Windows 10, and Windows 11 can open up a .7z file with a simple double click.
.zip and .gz no longer need to be used here in 2026.
Replies
.zip is used as a seekable container with some compression. There is no replacement comparable in simplicity. 7z is overcomplicated, compressed tar is not seekable.
.gz/deflate is used when something very cheap and very fast is needed. xz/lzma is quite often too slow or requires too much memory even on decompression.
so no, .zip and .gz are very much needed in 2026.
gzip is very fast, universally supported, and good enough. It will be around for ever.
you need python 3.14 for zstd.
GitHub won't let you upload a 7z file as an attachment for the issue tracker. Thus forcing me to use an inferior and obsolete compression format.