When I owned an Amiga they kept on changing the archive format to find a better one that saved space.
The had arc, pak, zip, zoo, warp, lharc, and every Amiga BBS I got on used a different archive format. Everyone had a different opinion on which archive format compressed things in the best way.
I think eventually they decided on lharc when they started to put PD and shareware files on the Internet.
Tar.gz is used because there are instructions for it everywhere and it seems like a majority of free and open source projects archive in it. It is a more popular format than the others right now. Might be because it is an older format and had more ports of it done.
But I really like 7zip, it seems to compress smaller archives, before 7Zip I used to use RAR but WinRAR wasn't open source and 7Zip is so I switched.
With high speed Internet it doesn't seem to matter much anymore unless the file is in over a gigabyte in size. Even then Bit Torrent can be used to download the large files. I think BitTorrent has some sort of compression included with it if I am not mistaken. To compress packets to smaller sizes over the torrent network and then resize them when the client downloads them. That is if compression is turned on and both clients support it.
> When I owned an Amiga they kept on changing the archive format to find a better one that saved space.
It happened on DOS too: ZIP, ARJ, RAR, ...
That was back on the days of floppy disks (which usually had at most 1440 KiB) and small hard disks (a few tens of megabytes). Even a few kilobytes could make a huge difference.
As storage and transfer speeds grew, "wasting" a few kilobytes is no longer that much of an issue, and other considerations like compatibility become more important. Furthermore, many new file formats have their own internal compression, so compressing them again gains almost nothing regardless of the compression algorithm.
The reason both ZIP and GZIP became ubiquitous is, IMO, that the compression algorithm both use (DEFLATE) was released as guaranteed to be patent-free, back in a time where IIRC most of the alternatives were either patented or compressed worse. As a consequence, everything that needed a lossless compression method chose DEFLATE (examples: the HTTP protocol, the PNG file format, and so on).
LHA and LZX were the popular pair when my Amiga days came to an end. Being a commercial product the latter kind of occupied a similar position RAR does on Windows.
Microsoft ended up adopting LZX for things like CAB and CHM files.
The had arc, pak, zip, zoo, warp, lharc, and every Amiga BBS I got on used a different archive format. Everyone had a different opinion on which archive format compressed things in the best way.
I think eventually they decided on lharc when they started to put PD and shareware files on the Internet.
Tar.gz is used because there are instructions for it everywhere and it seems like a majority of free and open source projects archive in it. It is a more popular format than the others right now. Might be because it is an older format and had more ports of it done.
But I really like 7zip, it seems to compress smaller archives, before 7Zip I used to use RAR but WinRAR wasn't open source and 7Zip is so I switched.
With high speed Internet it doesn't seem to matter much anymore unless the file is in over a gigabyte in size. Even then Bit Torrent can be used to download the large files. I think BitTorrent has some sort of compression included with it if I am not mistaken. To compress packets to smaller sizes over the torrent network and then resize them when the client downloads them. That is if compression is turned on and both clients support it.