is that opening a .deb in the GUI on ubuntu STILL just gives a list of apps that CAN open it, and puts the archiver above the package manager (which is just named Software)

if you are opening a .deb as an archive you already know what you're doing enough that I question using a GUI for it in the first place -- and even if you did, right click -> extract is right there

edit: both KDE and Gnome do this