all this talk about buying laptops…you guys can afford laptops right now?

well, it may be a hammer and nail thing for me (I work with compression a lot). But different compression algorithms are good at different things. Some solutions do better with text some solutions do better with structured data and some have special features that allow for enhanced compression with better tooling. GZip vs Brotli vs Zstd is a great example. Gzip is good at compressing small, structured data quickly where brotli accells at large text data and zstd is better at structured data and can be enhanced through training on that structure.

I’m pretty sure its repack they are trying to find the best way to make it as small as possible.

Well. ACTUALLY, it’s very simple you see every time you spin up a new linux box a little piece of Linus Torvold’s soul get’s imprinted in the CPU registers and then that fragment handles everything from there.