p7zip VS engrampa

nearly every main distro I am aware of has both available. The reason you still see p7zip is because the CLI incompatibilities vs the newer 7z/7zip executables and the general licensing issues. Most users of "old p7zip" are actually using the actively maintained https://github.com/p7zip-project/p7zip which is updated, supporting unix permissions and zstd and so on.

Thank you for pointing this out! This is the source of much confusion. Although Arch for example uses https://github.com/jinfeihan57/p7zip which seems to be reasonably maintained?

Then you can compile p7zip from source: $ mkdir p7zip-git $ cd p7zip-git $ git clone https://github.com/jinfeihan57/p7zip .

April 4th was the latest release. Had some commits in May. I think it is active.

I think the point is, the '7z' at 17.04 available in Arch Linux's repo is actually p7zip, the development of which is independent of 7-zip. So comparison of the version number is meaningless (if I am right). Also, p7zip 17.04 is released in April this year, not 2017, according to its release page

this comment might clarify that.

The p7zip port of 7-Zip is several releases behind and the project seems to be abandoned. I discovered this when a large archive failed to extract with Engrampa which uses it. It reported a "Headers Error" which is due to a compatibility problem between zip format implementations. 7-Zip has a fix but the port doesn't. But there's a fork on GitHub which is being actively maintained. Check it out.

Linux mint mate has something called "System Monitor" that is a running graphical plot of system activity. http://www.mate-desktop.org It is by the Mate developers. Very nice. It is similar to the windows monitor.

I use Engrampa. Which archive format I use depends on the use case. For example, if Windows users are involved, I usually use Rar archives. Under Linux, I usually use tar.xz.