HOW WE TESTED…
Our testing system this time was Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop. This detail is important because Linux applications such as file managers tend to inherit the theme and icon-set options of the underlying desktop environment.
Some of the features also rely on subsystems of the underlying distro. For example, network and archive mounting might rely on GVfs or KIO services on Gnome or KDE systems respectively.
For the archive testing, we created some example ZIP archives and downloaded some ISO images to test the systems. We made sure that we actually carried out some file management jobs to roadtest each file manager and throw up any awkward moments with each user interface or technical glitches once they were under the strain of actual work.
In the case of Midnight Commander and Krusader, we built from source to obtain the latest stable version as the versions in the Mint repository were out of date.