When comparing ROXTerm vs Termite, the Slant community recommends Termite for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux terminal emulators?” Termite is ranked 2nd while ROXTerm is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Termite is:
Termite is a minimalistic terminal emulator. It does not need too many resources to run and it's designed primarily to work with window managers.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Advanced D-Bus usage
In ROXTerm, users can use D-Bus to configure terminals from other applications, allowing for communication between multiple computer programs.
Pro Includes a configuration manager
ROXTerm includes a configuration manager which can easily be run by selecting Configure... in the terminal's menu, or by simply running roxterm-config. You can then easily swap configuration files with other users, manage profiles, and customize things like color schemes or keyboard shortcuts.
Pro Supports GTK3
ROXTerm uses the latest GTK widget set which is great a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.
Pro Drag and drop
ROXTerm supports dragging and dropping items into the Terminal window.
Pro Minimal terminal emulator
Termite is a minimalistic terminal emulator. It does not need too many resources to run and it's designed primarily to work with window managers.
Pro Works great with a tiling window manager
Termite is most suited to a tiling window manager with a simple config file.
Pro Vim-like behavior
Termite supports a command mode which is very useful if you prefer to use Vim-like keybindings. It takes inspiration from Vim, one of the most popular text editors, so someone who is used to Vim's commands will find themselves at home.
Pro Simple configuration
Termite is easy to configure. Reconfiguration does not require logging out or rebooting.
Pro 24-bit "True Color" support
Termite supports true color palettes, meaning that it allows for up to 16,777,216 possible colors.
Pro Simple font resizing
You can just press Ctrl-PLUS, Ctrl-MINUS or Ctrl-EQUALS to change font size.
Cons
Con Uncertain future
The original developer, Tony Houghton, declared the death of Roxterm on 2016-05 at https://sourceforge.net/p/roxterm/discussion/422638/thread/60da6975/?limit=25#3fc9.
In 2018, work began to resume on Github rather than Sourceforge (https://github.com/realh/roxterm/issues/1) but the future maintenance is uncertain.
Con Not for regular users
ROXTerm is made for power users who spend most of their time on the terminal. For a regular user using ROXTerm it would be an overkill.
Con Difficult to install in some distros
Con Cannot set specific parameters through CLI arguments
Setting specific parameters through CLI arguments is not supported in Termite.
Con Bad URL matching
Per default, there are some inconvenient issues with url matching.
Con Problem correctly displaying images while using compton
Images can sometimes not be displayed correctly in software such as ranger while using compton.
Con Limited documentation
There's only short manpages and a README on the front page of the repository which has few details on additional configuration and features.