>>246862
>>246863
>>246739
tar isn't a form of compression and it's not multithreaded lol
tar is just a way of sticking a bunch of files together. If you have file1.txt whose contents is "athronges" and file2.txt whose contents is "lukuas", you can run `tar cf combined.tar file1.txt file2.txt` to get a combined.tar file that's "athrongeslukuas" (oversimplication but yeah).
The actual compression software/format is xz. Once you have combined.tar, you run `xz combined.tar` and you'll get combined.tar.xz, which is just a compressed version of the tar archive. This is how I created the files for the collection I uploaded.
The ".tar.xz" extension is simply saying "this is an xz-compressed tar file".
Now xz *is* multithreaded (although you have to give it the `-T0` flag...), which immediately makes it x20 better than zip because I happen to have 20 cores in my CPU :^)
Unlike zip, though, xz can only work on a single file at a time. This is part of the UNIX philosophy: Every program should do exactly one thing, and do it well. So you have the `tar` program with the single purpose of combining many files into a single archive, and you have the `xz` program with the single purpose of being very good at compressing/decompressing. You then combine the two to get the job done. Formats like zip and 7z combine the two (very different!) functions into one, which you could say is "convenient", but if you extend this sort of "convenience"-based mentality to its logical endpoint what you get are bloated monstrous programs that hog all your memory and run slower than equivalent software from 20 years ago that ran on hardware 10% as fast as what we have today.