It is inspired by the user interface of RISC OS (not to be confused with RiscOS). The name "ROX" comes from "RISC OS on X".
The desktop uses the GTK toolkit, like the GNOME and XFce desktops. The design focusses 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.