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.
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.
Definitely OpenBSD’s default fvwm
TempleOS received mostly “sympathetic” reviews.
😅
Does OpenBSD really default to FVWM in 2024? Metal.
Yes, and not even the modern fvwm3, due to licensing issues.
A blast of the past.
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.
Many distros customize the colour schemes and theming of their desktops. The out-of-the-box XFCE in EOS looks nothing at all like vanilla XFCE for example.
Garuda Hyprland edition. All the neon-RGB styling of Garuda gamer on top of Hyprland’s smooth UI.
Upvoted. I forgot about this distro. I don’t like its neon style at all but it’s something different and pleasing for some people.
It’s finally an opinionated distro I agree with. Of course you can get anything to look like anything but I just like how they picked a path and went so far down it to make their own unique out-of-the-box experience.
I don’t like some of the other decisions in Garuda, but it’s become hard to get away from it when even regular non-technical people who see it are like “Whoa, what is all that” and you literally just finished installing it and didn’t even change the wallpaper. It’s a very different feeling from what I’m used to with Linux and I’m into it.
I don’t know why other distros don’t offer out-of-the-box rices like this. It’s just fun.
The new COSMIC desktop by System76 and Pop!_OS is very promising. I’ve been running the pre-alpha, and have been very impressed.
The current pop_os dark is already pretty damn good, it’s a very refined theme
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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.
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.
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
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!
Linux Mint has a smooth, out-of-your-way look & feel to either MATE or Cinnamon that just makes me feel at home
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.
You mean Desktop?
Distro, I think Lubuntu does LXQt better than Fedora LXQt.
But LXQt is a huge mix of mostly KDE Theming.
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
