hybryde

I think I looked over Arindam Sen's review of Hybryde Fusion 13.04 at least five times before I had to check the distro out for myself.

You'll want to follow the link to the review, because Sen goes into a lot more detail than I'll go into here.

Hybryde Fusion is probably the most fascinating distro I've ever come across. It comes with the following desktop environments/window managers: E17, GNOME 3 (GNOME Shell and GNOME 3 "Fallback Mode"), KDE4, LXDE, Openbox, Unity, fvwm, Xfce, MATE, and Cinnamon. Plus, something new, their own environment, apparently called HY-D-V1, which might just be the coolest part of it all.

And you can switch back and forth between any of these environments without logging out.

The whole thing is based on Ubuntu 13.04.

I don't know if Hybryd would be good to use on a production machine. I didn't install it, and probably won't. But I downloaded Hybryde-Fusion-release-live-dvd-i386.iso and used Unetbootin in Debian Wheezy to put it on a flash drive, then booted into the live session, using the "“Hypbryde Fusion en” boot option (Hybryde originates in France, and it looks like their forum is all in French, but the live session -- thankfully -- has an English language option).

The information window you see when you first boot into the live session is in French, though:

They include tons of applications -- from every environment. For example, I used KDE's KSnapshot for these screen shots. The Firefox, Chromium, and Rekonq web browsers are all included:

To switch to another environment, you click on the "Hybryde" button at the bottom and pick from the list:

Here, I've gone into GNOME Shell. The button with the arrow, at the right, takes you back into HY-D-V1:

Back in the HY-D-V1 environment, the "Magic" button at the bottom takes you here:

Click on the "Apps" button and you get something like a Dash or Activities overview:

Or, there's the "Sys" button, for some system info:

The HY-D-V1 environment, which apparently is (or will soon be) available via PPA for Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 13.04, looks like something I might want to use. Here's another view, showing access to various directories:

Changing to one of the other included desktop backgrounds is a snap:

I may have missed it, but I didn't see a way to have multiple workspaces/virtual desktops in the HY-D-V1 environment. Arindem Sen's review points out some other kinks that need to be worked out. But what the Hybryde devs have done here is awesome, if only as something for exploring different desktop environments; and I really like where they're going with HY-D-V1. Beautiful!

Here's a link to the Hybryde Linux DistroWatch page: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=hybryde