When comparing ROX Desktop vs Krusader, the Slant community recommends Krusader for most people. In the question“What are the best file managers for UNIX-like systems?” Krusader is ranked 9th while ROX Desktop is ranked 24th.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Fast
Programs open noticeably faster with ROX Desktop than with most other Desktop Environments.
Pro Official packages for major distributions
ROX can be built from source like many other solutions or can be installed from official packages available for all the major distributions (Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, Mandriva and Slackware).
Pro Singular load/save dialog
Instead of learning and navigating a multitude of file dialogs, simply drag and drop files between your app and your folders.
Pro Great two-pane interface
Pro Folder synchronization
Pro Handles most archives. There is little difference in behaviour between an archive file and a regular folder.
Pro Virtual file systems
Search results as example saved into virtual folder and can be accessed later. All file operations may be performed on items in search results as if they were files in single folder.
Pro All common operations can be done with keyboard efficiently
In addition, shortcuts can be easily renamed.
Unlike Dolphin and many others.
Pro SFTP support
Pro Many operations like copying and moving files can be queued
Long running operations can be queued.
There is no point in doing them in a parallel way, as speed decreases dramatically.
Pro Can view and edit many files
Even editing a file inside a .zip file.
Has hexadecimal viewer embedded for binary files.
Pro Filename association and instant console availability
Pro Multi-rename tool
Pro Searching capabilities and copying/deleting/moving in background
Pro Custom commands can be added to the menu easily
And they can use the current folder, the selected files....
Cons
Con Discontinued
discontinued since years, only the filemanager, the terminal and zeroinstall are still developed
Con Very ugly UI
Con Redundant default configuration
Because speed is one of the main points and objectives of ROX, the default configuration can be redundant for some and it's design also makes a lot of assumptions on how users prefer to work.
Con KDE dependencies
If you don't use KDE, you'll be forced to install quite a large amount of KDE libraries.
Con New releases are infrequent
It can be seen in https://quickgit.kde.org/?p=krusader.git that maintenance work is done in a continous fashion, but no new releases are provided.
Even though it is perhaps the more feature-rich file manager.