xz
Ranked 6 of 14 compression tools by recommenders
Free, widely available compression tool that people find gives good compression ratios and reproducible builds; critics point to a past backdoored release and slow speed.
Free, widely available compression tool that people find gives good compression ratios and reproducible builds; critics point to a past backdoored release and slow speed.
24 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 14
- criticize it
- 10
- approval share
- 58%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 14 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.4 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Good compression ratio
“they're considered to have better tradeoffs in teems of collision compression time and overall space saved by compression”
Comment from 14 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip” “got best compression out of xz for SQL”
Comment from 14 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Slow compression and decompression
“xz/lzma is quite often too slow or requires too much memory even on decompression”
Comment from 19 May 2026 in “Make ZIP files smaller with ZIP Shrinker” “bzip2 and xz are extremely slow to compress.”
Comment from 14 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip” “As expected, xz is super slow.”
Comment from 22 Jan 2026 in “ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss” Past backdoored release
“The upstream xz repository and the xz tarballs have been backdoored.”
Comment from 11 May 2026 in “Debian must ship reproducible packages” “it's not that long time ago when we had the xz malware”
Comment from 31 May 2026 in “Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software – Rsync” “The xz backdoor was a Debian and Red Hat issue”
Comment from 8 May 2026 in “GNU IFUNC is the real culprit behind CVE-2024-3094” - Comment from 7 Jan 2026 in “NPM to implement staged publishing after turbulent shift off classic tokens”
- Comment from 17 Apr 2026 in “Discourse Is Not Going Closed Source”
Other formats compress better
“bzip2 and xz are just no competition for zstd or the gzip family”
Comment from 15 Mar 2026 in “An Ode to Bzip” “The compression is not superior but already good if you consider just the uncompressed data”
Comment from 19 May 2026 in “Make ZIP files smaller with ZIP Shrinker”
Other compression tools people recommend
The four most recommended other compression tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zstandard (zstd) | 111 | 14 | 89% | 12 | — | Approved |
| Brotli | 24 | 18 | 57% | 7 | — | — |
| gzip | 23 | 13 | 64% | 8 | — | — |
| tar | 19 | 13 | 59% | 11 | — | — |
| xzThis page | 14 | 10 | 58% | 7 | — | — |
What people said
21 of the 25 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Until you link against xz”
“Saying this after the whole XZ utils ordeal has happened is quite interesting.”
“it's not that long time ago when we had the xz malware”
“The compression is not superior but already good if you consider just the uncompressed data”
“xz/lzma is quite often too slow or requires too much memory even on decompression”
“xz is pretty universal across POSIX and clones though”
“The upstream xz repository and the xz tarballs have been backdoored.”
“the xz package was reproducible”
“current one have safety and performance issue”
“The xz backdoor was a Debian and Red Hat issue”
“Remember xz utils backdoor?”
“bzip2 and xz are just no competition for zstd or the gzip family”
“got best compression out of xz for SQL”
“they're considered to have better tradeoffs in teems of collision compression time and overall space saved by compression”
“bzip2 and xz are extremely slow to compress.”
“The video showed that xz was a dependency of OpenSSH.”
“As expected, xz is super slow.”
“that's how I figured out to install xz in the end”
“It was caught by a Postgres developer who noticed strange performance on their Debian Sid system”
“shipped the libxz backdoor to everyone”
“The OpenSSH/XZ exploit from a year or so ago was actually a systemd exploit”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.