GNOME 41 dropped Archive Manager (file-roller) from GNOME Core, their list of recommended components. This is because the default file manager (nautilus) has built-in support for creating and extracting common compressed files (.zip
, tarballs, etc.).
Therefore, I propose that we drop Archive Manager from the default Ubuntu Desktop install. It will still be available for install.
If you want to try this out, you will need to use Ubuntu 23.04 “Lunar Lobster” (still in development). Yesterday, the Desktop Icons NG GNOME Shell extension was updated to drop the hard dependency on Archive Manager (Thanks Sergio & Marco for working on this!). The extension is an essential part of Ubuntu Desktop, so removing Archive Manager from older Ubuntu versions means you’re no longer running the supported Ubuntu Desktop. Sorry.
In my testing, I did notice that the built-in decompression used by nautilus and recent Desktop Icons NG doesn’t support as many file types. One example is .deb
but most people just want to install deb files, not extract them to look at individual files. As a developer, I’ll probably install file-roller on my computer to be able to handle those extra formats.