[bityard]

gzip has the advantage of being ubiquitous. It's pretty much guaranteed to be available on every modern Unix-alike. And is good enough for most purposes.

Zstd is getting there but I personally don't bother with it on a daily basis except in situations where both performance and compression ratio are important, like build artifact pipelines or large archives.

[daneel_w]

You're reading old comp-sci usenet discussions from 1993 and you come across this statement: "pkzip/lzh/arc/zoo have the advantage of being ubiquitous. We should not encourage the use of gzip". You chortle.

[pdimitar]

You make it sound like installing zstd is a big deal. Which it is not.

[hosteur]

It definitely can be on legacy systems.