7-Zip 21.0 alpha introduces native Linux support

[harlan4096]

Each year, the free archiver 7-Zip gets updated to a new version. The developer of the application has released two alpha previews of this year's 7-Zip 21 version. Reason enough to take a look at the new version of 7-Zip and the changes and improvements compared to the previous versions of the file archiver.The latest alpha release is available on the 7-Zip project site. Just download the 32-bit, 64-bit or 64-bit ARM64 version of the program from the site and run the installer after the download.

One of the main changes, introduced in the second alpha release, 7-Zip 21.01, is that a command line version of 7-Zip for Linux has been released. The release is not included in the main packages for Windows; the download site lists two downloads for the command line version for Linux that are for 32-bit/64-bit and 64-bit ARM Linux devices.

A readme file is included that explains core functionality of the command line version. The Linux version includes all changes from the latest 7-Zip version for Windows.

The full changelog is relatively short. The first alpha version, released in January 2021, made internal code changes, fixed several unspecified bugs, and added Tajik and Uzbek localizations.

The latest release, 7-Zip 21.01 alpha, released on March 9, 2021, includes several improvements. Next to the Linux command line version, it is addressing a long-standing bug in 7-Zip that dates back to version 18.02.

Previous versions of 7-Zip had sometimes issue extracting ZIP archives with xz compression; this bug is fixed in the latest alpha release of 7-Zip and will find its way into the next stable release of the application as well.

Speed of the ARM64 version of 7-Zip has been improved in the release according to the release notes. Last but not least, several bugs were fixed that were not mentioned specifically.

The alpha version ran stable and without issues on the test system; most users may want to wait until the final version is released. Those on Linux may give the new command line version a go on the other hand.

Now You: which file archiver do you use?
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