It’s in the eye of the beholder, of course. But it would be great to see some solid recommendations.
I don’t think it’s the distros job to look visually appealing. That’s the job of the desktop environment. Seriously I wish distributions would just ship vanilla desktop environments. All of the themed variants always have some issues. Maybe I’m just old and stubborn but that’s my opinion.
Assuming that the default is good then yes. But some default DEs are ugly as sin, or just hard to use.
I can’t think of any desktop environments that are ugly or hard to use out of the box
Granted.
For a beginner, however, this is a difference that would take some explaining. As you said, some distros heavily theme the desktop environments (DE) before shipping, so in that sense the question is fair.
By extension, of course, I am with you, as with the right amount of work, any distro can run any DE and make it look any way.
You’re asking about the desktop environment and its default settings, which may or may not be the same on any given distro.
But I have a tie between Plasma and Cinnamon (mint’s DE). They both take only minor tweaking to get where I want them, and I can use them both out of the box with zero complaints.
I think GNOME looks very visually appealing with it’s consistency. The Libadwaita library has a nice aesthetic and looks very clean with nice spacing for elements to “breathe”.
I still prefer KDE since I can tailor the look to my needs and I prefer to have clutter over extra clicks. (I have top bar with “Opened programs”, Launcher, System tray, Time and a global menu and KWin script for managing Activities)
I feel like modern era of design has gone a bit overboard with the “clean” direction. It can be contrasted with Windows XP where you click “All programs” and you literally get all programs in the start menu with options of how to run or open them. I prefer to do “Menu” - > “Submenu” - > “Thing I want”.
Come to think of it I should probably make a launcher for KDE.
Pop!_OS
Gnome with a bit of a macOS twist. I really like it. I’m excited for Cosmic!
GNOME
Fedora Workstation. Gnome is pretty great on the eyes, and there’s a healthy Libadwaita apps ecosystem that is just *chefs kiss*
ElementaryOS also looks great for the system and core apps, although there’s not really a third party app ecosystem that fits with the Pantheon theme, unfortunately.
EndeavourOS has a pretty nice colour scheme and wallpaper going by default.
If I was forced to use a default distro look, it would be that or Linux Mint probably.
Garuda Linux looks very nice
Really depends on the desktop but in terms of default desktops that are shipped with distros I’m picking Fedora’s GNOME (pretty much stock) and MX Linux’s XFCE.
Just installed a USB boot for Mint (cinnamon) and MX (xfce).
Both are so much nicer than I expected.
Trying to figure out how to put together a sub-distro for friends & family that are considering moving away from windows.
MX ranks higher out of the box (comes with VLC installed).
Pantheon desktop (Elementary OS)
Honestly, whilst I would not recommend this at all, I find CutefishOS (you could argue it doesn’t even need to be a distro) incredibly visually appealing.
Perhaps I will get downvoted for being a sucker for modern visuals, but the theme is consistent, simple and easy on my eyes.
Although I like GNOME, the consistency bothers me and some of the design choices are inconsistent and don’t make for a great user experience, looking at Nautilus for example.
I’ve seen Gnome spiffed up to a level of polish I’d expect from an Apple commercial. I hate using it, but some folks get it looking nice.
As one comment mentioned, it depends more on the DE. But out of the box, I’d say Peppermint, Elementary, and Mint.
Hmm there is stuff like Archcraft (maybe it has a different name now idk) that is made specifically for visuals. In terms of usable distros I’d say Xero is the best I know. It seems to be discontinued though. CachyOS has some nice WM setups too but the appealing visuals can’t be consistent in that case because they are not full DEs and the unreasonably tiny calendar pop-up window from Xfce always ruins everything.
LMDE (Mint Cinnamon)
