It’s in the eye of the beholder, of course. But it would be great to see some solid recommendations.
Weird way to misspell desktop environment. Or wm defaults. A gnome reskin isn’t a distro.
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.
Fuckin same. It took so long for me to realize a lot of issues I had wasn’t because gnome was shit, it was because every distro fucks with gnome until it’s unusable. I finally tried fedora and now gnome is my favorite DE and I love the workflow.
Yeah, distros should, at most, change the default accent color and some pannel icon, but no more than that.
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.
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.
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.
I second this but after getting Hyprland setup to my liking I don’t think I’ll ever go back to gnome or kde
Hyprland is definitively not noob friendly. Are you running it on Arch or Fedora? I’ve been wanting to try it, but with all the config file work needed, it scares me to have it break at some or other update.
I’m using regular Fedora 40 workstation with Gnome
If you enable the update testing repo you can just install “stable” hyprland using dnf.
I’d say the tricky part of config at the start is getting your monitors setup but you can use ‘hyprctl monitors’ to list the monitors and get the ids. The documentation/wiki is really good
Once you’ve got it installed you can logout of gnome and select hyprland from the cog on the login screen.
If you want the git release of hyprland you can use this Copr https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/solopasha/hyprland/
Other stuff I use Rofi for launching apps Hyprpaper for wallpapers Waybar-git for the bar Kitty for terminal
Awesome. Fedora is my main driver (when i’m not distrohopping, lol). Thank you so much for sharing this. I’ll be taking it for a spin over the weekend.
Nice! have fun.
I’d definitely avoid downloading other people’s hyprland dot files. Most are over complicated.
Just keep it simple to fit your needs
Linux Mint has a smooth, out-of-your-way look & feel to either MATE or Cinnamon that just makes me feel at home
Garuda Linux looks very nice
Hardy Heron
Hardy Heron
Ah, I really liked Ubuntu looks in old (4.04 - 8.04) versions. The brown/orange is so much better than the newer gray/purple/red whatever. Since 10.04 the theme and color scheme has been awful.
deepin or zorin
I like simple default, so it is easier to customize. But If I have to keep the default I would say Garuda.
Mint with Papirus icons and blue accent colour set to match the folder icons of Papirus them.
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).
Deepin looks great, I wouldn’t use it but it looks great.
Right, looks great BUT… It’s a shit
And also Chinese
Thing: :|
Thing, China: >:(
The project is fully open source; albeit the codebase is quite large.
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.
Pantheon desktop (Elementary OS)
LMDE (Mint Cinnamon)
