Here is the comparative numbers reported by Arch devs on which they based their decision to use this fast but resource hungry compression tool. XZ still wins in size, loses on time, while ZSTD is a huge loser in memory use while compressing; decompressing is comparable and equally fast. Zstd (gang) software also relies heavily on very current powerful server grade machines to provide the benefit of speed, to make up what it lacks in quality. Compression software should primarily be judged on their ability to compress, and zstd fails miserably against this 45 year old trusty switchblade called xz. So we can conclude that arch has an abundance of computing/building/packaging apparatus, with truck loads of spare ram to parallely process many packages.
My article (a link to it) was removed from r/linux yesterday for no good reason, 100% linux related material, and as I complained I was permanently banned from posting there.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/ejn5c5/arch_2020_welcomes_its_little_brothers_and/
In case you are wondering I was reporting that arch nearly silently started using this facebook compression algorithm on packaging and here is their own test data to support this decision: Continue reading
systemd-free linux community 