When comparing File Roller vs Xarchiver, the Slant community recommends File Roller for most people. In the question“What are the best archivers on Linux?” File Roller is ranked 3rd while Xarchiver is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose File Roller is:
File-roller is the official gnome archive manager and used in other desktop environments too. The large user-base and active development have made it stable.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Well supported
File-roller is the official gnome archive manager and used in other desktop environments too. The large user-base and active development have made it stable.
Pro Can show a file list without loading the whole archive
For 7zip-files (perhaps other types too) while File Roller cannot do this.
Cons
Con Can't preview 7Zip archives
File Roller (and Engrampa which was forked from File Roller) has to read the whole 7zip archive to show the content.
Con Segfaults when creating large archives
When creating large archives it crashes and doesn't show you any helpful message (unless you started it from the terminal you will get something like "[1] 14858 segmentation fault (core dumped) xarchiver").
Con Doesn't show a progress UI while it's creating an archive
You have to "guess" when it's done.
Con Not in active development
Xarchiver has only one maintainer and it seems he's not working on it actively.