ROX Desktop

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ROX Desktop is a lightweight, now-discontinued graphical desktop environment for Unix-like systems, built around the ROX-Filer drag-and-drop, spatial file manager. It uses the GTK toolkit and was inspired by the look of RISC OS, with the name coming from “RISC OS on X Window System.”

In ROX, applications are installed and run as executable folders. You copy or delete these folders to install or remove programs, and you can start apps directly from the filer. The system is closely tied to Zero Install, a decentralized way to publish and run software from URLs. With Zero Install, you can install a program by dragging it from the web into the archiver and then into your applications directory. The first time you launch a program, the system downloads it; later launches reuse the downloaded copy. No traditional installation or admin rights are required.

ROX-Filer is the file manager for the X Window System and can work on its own or as part of the ROX Desktop. It has been the default file manager in some Linux distributions, such as Puppy Linux and Dyne:bolic, and was used in Xubuntu before Thunar matured. ROX-Filer is GPL-licensed.

The project was started by Thomas Leonard around 1999 at the University of Southampton and remained led by him for many years. The overall design emphasizes small, simple programs that pass data between each other via drag-and-drop, enabling workflows like dragging data from a web browser to an archiver and then into a spreadsheet. Zero Install supports running multiple versions side-by-side and avoids traditional installations, making software management more flexible and decentralized.