Knoppix may be run with several desktops, and GNOME and KDE can be chosen with the desktop cheatcode. After the introduction of LXDE, there does, however not seem to be so much interest in other lightweight alternatives.
What about using Enlightenment and the EFL (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries)? This is used in a Ubuntu derivative called Bodhi Linux, and some users seem to be very content - it's seemingly not the best for newbies, though.
What makes Enlightenment particularly interesting to me, is that it is the preferred desktop alternative for the Tizen project for full-version Linux on mobile devices (as opposed to the kernel+Android stack approach) This is Debian-based, and shouldn't really be that far from Knoppix, porting Knoppix to mobile devices should become easier with every day now.
Using Enlightenment with Knoppix could provide one of the stepping stones to mobile Knoppix, or is this approach futile?
Without having asked about this, I guess KK's first answer will be negative. Knoppix is extremely hardware agnostic, but achieves that by sticking to hardware based on x86 architectures, and keeps the 32-bits approach. Not even a 64-bits version is in sight (if things haven't changed lately), and I have come to support his approach, IMHO it's very practical to chroot into a 64-bits system from hybrid Knoppix and doing everything purely 64 bits there.
This 32/64-bits situation will relatively soon be parallelled in the mobile scene, making the whole situation even more convoluted.
It will be very interesting to see how the Tizen project develops - but there will actually be several Debian-based mobile alternatives. A Ubuntu version was recently announced, and you can already download an alpha release of Bodhi for the Asus Nexus 7 tablet. The Knoppix take on this might be to adapt a minirt.gz for mobile devices, which I guess will have to be tweaked separately for each new device in the first place.
With 2-4GB of RAM and 16-32GB of internal storage on the upcoming devices, there should be room for a Knoppix compressed image+persistent store without wiping out anything else, setting up for multi-boot.
1PC Matching pair Xeon CPU Processor X5660 X5670 X5675 X5680 X5690 LGA1366
$35.13
Intel - Core i9-12900K Desktop Processor 16 (8P+8E) Cores up to 5.2 GHz Unloc...
$331.99
Intel - Core i7-12700K Desktop Processor 12 (8P+4E) Cores up to 5.0 GHz Unloc...
$236.99
Intel 6 Core i5-8600 3.1GHZ Desktop Processor SR3X0
$50.00
Intel - Core i9-14900K 14th Gen 24-Core 32-Thread - 4.4GHz (6.0GHz Turbo) Soc...
$539.99
Intel Core i5-6500 Quad-Core Processor 3.2 GHz 6MB LGA1151
$23.99
Intel - Core i7-14700K 14th Gen 20-Core 28-Thread - 4.3GHz (5.6GHz Turbo) Soc...
$399.99
Intel - Core i9-13900K 13th Gen 24 cores 8 P-cores + 16 E-cores 36M Cache, 3 ...
$519.99
Intel Core i3-12100F Processor (4.3 GHz, 4 Cores, LGA 1700) Box - BX8071512100F
$83.50
AMD EPYC 7282 cpu processor 16 cores 32 threads 2.8GHZ up to 3.2GHZ 120w
$78.00