Don't Use RAR

I used RAR all the time in late 1990s-early 00s. It had great usability, great FAR Manager integration - unsurprising since they both were created by the same person, Eugene Roshal (incidentally, he was studying a few years earlier on the same faculty / specialty as I).

But when I switched to GNU/Linux, the reasons to use RAR died quietly. It had a good run, but didn't get the widespread platform support it needed to succeed as an archive standard. It being a proprietary product didn't help in that, I guess.

I remember downloading a torrent of winrar compressed in rar when I was younger. That troll gave me a good laugh.

> Does anyone know why RAR is better compression-wise than the two more modern standards?

It simply uses a much slower algorithm (prediction by partial matching, PPM) in the highest setting. Those modern standards are designed to be fast enough and improve the status quo in that performance target. If they were only concerned about the compression ratio there are tons of other algorithms that would handily beat RAR already.

I strongly prefer WinRAR (the software) because it does everything I am looking for in an archiving and compressing software.

- It is a great tool for archiving. Especially in Windows, it is often faster to compress a rar archive than copying several hundreds of files. This fills the lack of a `tar` tool in Windows space.

- It supports changing the compression level during the compression.

- Highly backwards compatible format. The newer rar format is opt-in.

- WinRAR supports various formats such as ISO, JAR, and a few typical zip-ish formats.

- Superior drag and drop support.

- Context-aware extraction. For example, if you double click a PNG, it only extracts that PNG file. For an exe, it extracts the whole thing.

- Splitting files, locked archives, AES protection, SFX, and other features are easily accessible.

I use 7-zip for zstd, and brotli cli when I particularly need those formats. For my personal archives, rar format and WinRAR never let me down.

Yes, I get that it's not an open source software and doesn't come with a permissive license, but neither do Windows OS itself, and many other software I use. There is an open source unrar, so I don't fear being locked out on my archived.

I happily paid the $29 even though I could absolutely use it without paying a dime, just like thousands of other users.

Zstandard and Brotli are also not an archiving format, which the layperson normally expects to be a "compression" format, so the comparison is a bit off. But that doesn't really matter because there is 7-zip which is an archiving format AND compression format AND competitive to RAR AND open-source.