Xarchiver is the only Desktop Environment independent frontend. It only uses GTK+2 for the GUI and nothing else. Obviously you need the command line archivers since Xarchiver is only a frontend.
These are the features:
* Easy to use. No useless options
* Archives are detected by their magic header and not by extension except .tar.bz2 and .tar.gz
* Lightweight, you only need GTK+2 and nothing else
* Smart detection of arj, zip and rar password encrypted archives
* All the info of the files stored are displayed
* All common formats are supported: arj, bzip2, gzip, 7z, rar, tar, tar.bz2, tar.gz, zip and RPM (only extract)
* Fast, even when opening an archive of several megabytes
* Zip, rar, arj and 7z password encrypted archives are fully supported
* Support of RPM files without RPM executable, this is useful on distro no RPM-based like Slackware and Archlinux
* No need of any external viewer like Leafpad or Gedit to view a file in the archive
* User friendly, a progress bar is shown while operating on the archive
