Ark
The archive tool built into KDE desktops. Opens and creates zip, 7z, rar and tar files from the right-click menu.
Our verdict
Ark is the archive window you land in when you double-click a zip file on a KDE desktop. It is already installed, so for most people the whole question of "what replaces 7-Zip" is answered before they ask it.
The daily routine is the same as Windows. Right-click, extract here, or drag files onto an open archive to add them. It reads the awkward formats too, including 7z and rar, which is where a lot of switchers expect trouble and do not find any.
Two limits are worth knowing. It can open rar archives but not make them, and if you want an archive split into 100MB chunks the way 7-Zip does it, Ark is not the tool. For everything else it just gets out of the way.
What's good
- Already installed on KDE systems such as Kubuntu, so there is nothing to add
- Handles zip, 7z, gzip, bzip2, tar and rar, which covers almost everything that arrives by email
- Right-click an archive and choose extract, the same habit you have on Windows
- Can look inside an archive and preview a file before pulling it out
What to know first
- Not there by default if your system uses GNOME, which ships a simpler archive tool instead
- Cannot create rar files, only read them, because the rar format is not free to write
- Fewer options than 7-Zip for splitting archives across several files
- The encryption settings are plainer than the ones in WinZip
The details
- Cost
- Free
- Open source
- Yes (GPL-2.0-or-later)
- How you install it
- App store (Flatpak), .deb installer, .rpm installer, Built-in app store
Windows apps it can replace
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