[arp242]

It's been a long time since I used Windows, but back in the day I used 7-Zip exactly because it could open more or less $anything. That's also why we installed it on many customer computers.

On Linux bsdtar/libarchive gives a similar experience: "tar xf file" works on most things.

[devilbunny]

7-Zip is like VLC: maybe not the best, but it’s free (speech and beer) and handles almost anything you throw at it. For personal use, I don’t care much about efficient compression either computationally or in terms of storage; I just want “tar, but won’t make a 700 MB blank ISO9660 image take 700 MB”.

[tssva]

Windows 11 has shipped with bsdtar/libarchive for a few years. The gui shell support for archive files was recently changed to use libarchive which has increased the supported archive files which can be opened in the shell.