@DigitalJacobin

DigitalJacobin@lemmy.ml · edit-2 1 year ago

This is the kind of thing i think about all the time so i have a few.

Archive files: .tar.zst
- Produces better compression ratios than the DEFLATE compression algorithm (used by .zip and gzip/.gz) and does so faster.
- By separating the jobs of archiving (.tar), compressing (.zst), and (if you so choose) encrypting (.gpg), .tar.zst follows the Unix philosophy of “Make each program do one thing well.”.
- .tar.xz is also very good and seems more popular (probably since it was released 6 years earlier in 2009), but, when tuned to it’s maximum compression level, .tar.zst can achieve a compression ratio pretty close to LZMA (used by .tar.xz and .7z) and do it faster^[1].
  
  zstd and xz trade blows in their compression ratio. Recompressing all packages to zstd with our options yields a total ~0.8% increase in package size on all of our packages combined, but the decompression time for all packages saw a ~1300% speedup.
Image files: JPEG XL/.jxl
- “Why JPEG XL”
- Free and open format.
- Can handle lossy images, lossless images, images with transparency, images with layers, and animated images, giving it the potential of being a universal image format.
- Much better quality and compression efficiency than current lossy and lossless image formats (.jpeg, .png, .gif).
- Produces much smaller files for lossless images than AVIF^[2]
- Supports much larger resolutions than AVIF’s 9-megapixel limit (important for lossless images).
- Supports up to 24-bit color depth, much more than AVIF’s 12-bit color depth limit (which, to be fair, is probably good enough).
Videos (Codec): AV1
- Free and open format.
- Much more efficient than x264 (used by .mp4) and VP9^[3].
Documents: OpenDocument / ODF / .odt
- @raubarno@lemmy.ml says it best here. .odt is simply a better standard than .docx.
it’s already a NATO standard for documents Because the Microsoft Word ones (.doc, .docx) are unusable outside the Microsoft Office ecosystem. I feel outraged every time I need to edit .docx file because it breaks the layout easily. And some older .doc files cannot even work with Microsoft Word.