Ark — The Complete Guide: KDE’s Open-Source Archive Manager for Linux
Ark is the archive manager of the KDE desktop on Linux and ships preinstalled on distributions that use it. It creates ZIP, 7Z and TAR archives with GZ, BZ2, XZ or ZST compression, and also opens RAR (via unrar), ISO and CAB. It integrates with the Dolphin file manager, so packing a results folder or unpacking a received bundle takes a single right-click.
Ark
KDE
KDE’s archive manager for Linux: create, browse, preview and edit ZIP, 7Z and TAR, and open RAR, ISO and CAB.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Archive browsing — the folder structure is shown like a file manager.
- Preview — open a file inside the archive without extracting everything.
- Editing — add and delete files in an existing archive.
- Context menu — compress and extract straight from Dolphin.
- Open source — GPL, free for any use including commercial.
Tip: missing formats
Ark drives the system’s libraries and command-line tools. If RAR or 7Z files will not open, install unrar or 7-Zip from your package repository. Users outside KDE can install it from Flathub.
Related tools
The GNOME counterpart — File Roller. For light desktops such as Xfce — Xarchiver. For a feature-rich graphical archiver that also runs on Windows — PeaZip.
File Roller
GNOME Project
The GNOME archive manager on Linux: create, view and extract ZIP, 7Z and TAR, and open RAR, ISO, DEB and RPM.
Get it from the vendor
Xarchiver
Ingo Brückl (originally Giuseppe Torelli)
Lightweight Linux archive manager independent of any desktop environment: ZIP, 7Z and TAR, plus RAR, ARJ, DEB and RPM.
Get it from the vendor
PeaZip
Giorgio Tani
Open, create and encrypt archives in 200+ formats, including splitting large model files.
Get it from the vendor
Engrampa
MATE Desktop
The MATE desktop’s archive manager on Linux, a fork of File Roller: create and extract ZIP, 7Z and TAR, and open RAR and ISO.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
On a KDE Linux machine, Ark is all you need to pack and unpack bundles of data, models and calculation results. It is free, open source and already there.