Xarchiver — The Complete Guide: A Lightweight Linux Archive Manager Independent of Any Desktop
Xarchiver is a lightweight graphical archive manager for Linux and FreeBSD. It depends only on the GTK libraries and is not tied to any desktop environment, so it is common on Xfce, LXDE and older computers. It opens in a moment, shows the archive contents in a simple list and lets you extract all files or just the ones you select.
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 vendorWhat you get
- Creation — ZIP, 7Z and TAR with GZ, BZ2, XZ or ZST.
- Opening — RAR (via unrar), ARJ, LHA and CPIO.
- Packages — open DEB and RPM even without their package managers.
- Light and fast — starts quickly even on a weak machine.
- Open source — GPL, free for any use.
How it works
Xarchiver does not compress by itself; it drives the system’s command-line tools such as zip, 7z and unrar. If a format will not open, install the matching tool. Xarchiver itself is installed from your distribution’s package repository.
Related tools
For the MATE desktop — Engrampa. For KDE, with preview and editing — Ark. For GNOME — File Roller.
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 vendor
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 vendor
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
PeaZip
Giorgio Tani
Open, create and encrypt archives in 200+ formats, including splitting large model files.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
For a lab PC, a virtual machine or a server with a minimal desktop, Xarchiver gives you graphical archive handling without unnecessary weight or dependencies.