ROX Desktop



The ROX Desktop is a discontinued graphical desktop environment for the X Window System. It is based on the ROX-Filer which is a drag and drop spatial file manager. It is free software released under the GNU General Public License. The environment was inspired by the user interface of RISC OS (not to be confused with RISC/os). The name "ROX" comes from "RISC OS on X". Programs can be installed or removed easily using Zero Install, a decentralized software installation system.

The project was started by Thomas Leonard as a student at University of Southampton in 1999 and was still led by him in 2012.

Software components
The ROX Desktop is a desktop environment based on the ROX-Filer file manager. Files are loaded by applications by using drag and drop from the filer to the application, and saved by dragging back to the filer. Applications are executable directories, and are thus also installed (copied), uninstalled (deleted), and run through the filer interface. ROX has a strong link with Zero Install, a method of identifying and executing programs via a URL, to make software installation completely automatic.

The desktop uses the GTK toolkit, like the GNOME and Xfce desktops. The design focuses on small, simple programs using drag-and-drop to move data between them. For example, a user might load a compressed file into a spreadsheet from the web by dragging the data from the web browser to the archiver, and from there into the spreadsheet. A program would be installed in the same way, by dragging the archive from the web to the archiver, and from there to the applications directory in the filer.

Drag-and-drop saving allows the user to save the text file to any directory they please, or directly to another application, such as the archiver on the panel.

ROX Filer
ROX-Filer is a graphical spatial file manager for the X Window System. It can be used on its own as a file manager, or can be used as part of ROX Desktop. It is the file manager provided by default in certain Linux distributions such as Puppy Linux and Dyne:bolic, and was used in Xubuntu until Thunar became stable.

ROX-Filer is built using the GTK+ toolkit. Available under the terms of the GPL-2.0-or-later license, ROX-Filer is free software.

Zero Install
Zero Install (or 0install) is a multi-platform (Windows, Linux, macOS) system for running applications that allows publishing applications in a decentralized way (without using central repositories, directly on the project websites). Unlike the xcopy mechanism, 0install retains the advantages of repositories: shared libraries, automatic updates, validation of digital signatures.

Zero Install uses the metadata (sometimes called the feed format) written in XML. Like with xcopy deployment, each application gets its own directory and there are no side effects inflicted upon the OS, so no administrative rights are needed and different versions of the same application can be run side-by-side without special modifications.

To run an application, the user needs to use a launcher in ROX-Filer, that will ask the system to run an application with the given URL in the script inside the launcher. At the first time launching it, the URL will be used to download the program and save it in the system. The next times the program is launched, the system will not download it again. This is the reason why it is called Zero Install: the launcher tries to run the program, and not install it.