SUMMARY If I have a tar.gz file inside of a zip file, ark is (sometimes!) unable to open that directly. I have to first extract the tarball and then open that extracted one in a new ark instance. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. I'm unsure how to create a file locally that makes ark act like this. I've been managing to get it with Randovania's CI artifacts ( https://github.com/randovania/randovania/actions/workflows/build-test-publish.yml , you can use nightly.link to not have the requirement of a github account: https://nightly.link/randovania/randovania/workflows/build-test-publish/main?preview ) 2. Open the downloaded zip in ark 3. Try to open the included tarball via double clicking OBSERVED RESULT Nothing happens. The right click options for preview/open in/open in external application are grayed out EXPECTED RESULT Double clicking should open a new ark window previewing the contents of the tarball. The right click options shouldn't be grayed out. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: Arch Linux KDE Plasma Version: 6.1.5 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.6.0 Qt Version: 6.7.2 Kernel Version: 6.10.10-arch1-1 (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 12 × AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Six-Core Processor Memory: 15.6 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 570 Series ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
This is happening because those tarballs are quite huge. Ark by default doesn't allow to preview a file bigger than 200 MB. This limit can be configured in the ark settings dialog. I'll leave this this report open because we can probably implement a better UX these days. This "feature" was originally implemented to prevent the UI from freezing when previewing a huge file (see https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=139389), but this has since been fixed and the UI doesn't freeze anymore. Still, it might make sense to ask a confirmation before starting an extraction that might take a while.
There being no in-app hint of it being controllable in the settings is really unintuitive. A prompt that mentions it is a setting when attempting to preview or repurposing the setting to be "warn when opening previews bigger than X" would be nicer IMO.