Compatibility aside, I’d say that .tar.pxz aka .tpxz is probably my vote.
LZMA is probably what I’d want to use. xz and 7zip use that. It’s a bit slow to compress, but it has good compression ratios, and it’s faster to decompress than bzip2.
pixz permits for parallel LZMA compression/decompression. On present-day processors with a lot of cores, that’s desirable.
Compatibility aside, I’d say that
.tar.pxzaka.tpxzis probably my vote.LZMA is probably what I’d want to use.
xzand7zipuse that. It’s a bit slow to compress, but it has good compression ratios, and it’s faster to decompress than bzip2.pixzpermits for parallel LZMA compression/decompression. On present-day processors with a lot of cores, that’s desirable.https://github.com/vasi/pixz
It also can use .tar as its container format, which is desirable; that’s everywhere.
The major drawback to .tar is that it doesn’t support indexed access, so extracting a single file isn’t fast, but .tar.pxz does.