Hi, everybody!

Edit: I've released an iso of the first version. See post #4 of this thread.

I've been playing with and testing a lot of different desktop environments (15+) recently. Since I found that many people today are interested in this subject, I thought about creating a single live medium which would allow the user to test them all without much hassle.

There are really plenty of intersting DEs available for Linux - but unfortunately many of them are not really well-known. Even if you're a long-time Linux user: Have you heard about a light-weight Qt based DE called razor-qt? Did you know that there's an extremely light-weight DE build upon FLTK which goes by the name of Equinox Desktop Environment? Have you ever tried the ROX desktop?

And especially for Linux newbies the situation is extremely unpleasant and confusing (when I had my initial contact with Linux in the last millenium, as a typical Windows user I was bewildered that there were two DEs to chose from! ) Today it seems that some people are lost between GNOME, KDE, Unity, Xfce, LXDE, Cinnamon, MATE, ...

I've built a first alpha version which currently fits on a CD and contains 5 DEs to select from after booting up. When adding all DEs I could get to run on my test distro (Arch Linux), the ISO is a bit over 1 GB in size - which I think is acceptable. However I'm having problems getting some of them to work from a live medium, too.

Among all these DEs are - of course - some which I don't like too much and digging into their issues much deeper means investing a lot of time for potentially no gain.

So what I'd like to know: What do you think about a project like this? Do you like the idea or doesn't it even make sense to you at all?

In case of positive feedback, I'll post a link to it here and will try to improve it sooner or later. If not - well, then I don't have to waste my time on something nobody needs.

To me that sounds very interesting, i wouldn't consider myself a newbie but I still have a lot to learn & I consider this to be a pretty good tool.

Not much of a great response as of yet but hopefully it will pick up.

How can I obtain a copy?

Maybe you want have to look here: http://www.hybryde.org/
The site is in french, but basically Hybride Linux is a distribution that comes with Kde, Gnome3, Unity, E17, XFCE, LXDE, Openbox and FVWM. If you don't want to contribute there it may at least be an inspiration, since, if I understand that correctly, they are able to switch the desktop on the fly.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi, Dman58!

Thanks for your answer! I see things the same way: The experiments I do are meant to learn something from them. But if I'm doing things anyway, I think that I can just share them as well. The only question is if it's worthwile to put more time into it for the benefit of others.

I hope so, too. 2 votes from over 100 viewers is really not much. I actually expected more people to participate in the poll than people posting a reply. But that's the net: You get surprised time after time! *g*

I've posted it to my blog today but you can download it directly from Bitshare. It's currently 615 MB in size. Md5sum for it is: To log in the user "desktopdemodvd" the password is simply ddd.

Any feedback on it is very welcome!

Hi, Tobi and thanks a lot for this one! I had never heard of it before, and it sounds very interesting (plus it's somewhat close to what I'm trying to do). However I'd like to ultimately get even more desktops to work from one DVD plus some of their default applications so that anybody could easily test which DEs are to his or her liking.

But let's see how things develop.

I agree entirely.

I'm still relatively uneducated in terms of DE's and WM's - thus far, I have only tried Gnome/Xfce/Openbox. Something like this would make it much easier for users like myself to continue exploring the available options with a relatively low expenditure of time and effort.

Here is an interesting and somewhat-related thread from the CrunchBang forums: 30 Window Managers in 30 days. Perhaps you could get some ideas for things to include.

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi, R3nCi and thanks for your post!

That's really a fine ressource! I left out WMs on purpose and concentrated on DEs for the "DDD". But personally I'm interested in WMs as well and perhaps they could be stuffed into the project as well since it's these are two worlds rather close to each other. And in terms of space they should not be much of a problem considering how huge KDE or GNOME alone are.

Perhaps a boot menu which lets you select if you want to take a look at DEs or test some WMs? I want to keep them seperated so things don't become even more confusing than they absolutely must. I guess that it should be possible to have alternative start scripts which alter the *.desktop files which are read in by the login managers. Hm... Certainly another interesting field! Thanks for your link. I'll consider WMs in the future (but first I've got to get some more DEs working on the live medium).

I'd say that sounds like a plan! Be sure to keep me updated

Have a look here: http://linuxbbq.org/release_linuxbbq-0.5-oyster.php

This is very interesting.

To the OP: your bitshare link has gone down. Any chance of a reupload?

That sound really good bro,finally something uniqe is there