It’s in the eye of the beholder, of course. But it would be great to see some solid recommendations.
Pantheon desktop (Elementary OS)
Pop!_OS
Gnome with a bit of a macOS twist. I really like it. I’m excited for Cosmic!
I like the look of tiling wms with a top bar. Hyprland looks especially nice with rounded corners and color gradients. Too bad it’s not stable enough to be my daily driver at the moment.
Garuda Linux looks very nice
Distros aren’t going to be visually appealing as they typically and just standard desktops or CLI
highly subjective
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.
DDE?
Elementary has some very clean sober themes. I fell in the tilling windows craze and ricing so I’m sporting an Arch (I use it btw) with AwesomeWM, so very minimalistic.
deepin or zorin
The distribution doesn’t to too much, its mostly the desktop environment. I like the look of KDE Plasma the most. But usually I craft my own look after a while.
I took it as a question of which distro looks nicest out of the box (like, which distro manager has made real effort to make something particularly nice looking).
Somebody needs to tell me what they’re doing to Plasma to make them like it so much because when I install it with Breeze it just looks like Windows 2000.
I don’t really care how it looks precisely, so long as its semi-professional and consistent in its style.
Like, I change the font to Fira Sans, because Noto Sans gives me depression, but the rest of my customizations are all just to carve out my ideal workflow.
Windows 2000 looks nothing alike KDE Plasma with Breeze theme. But besides that point, you don’t have to like what others like. It’s just taste.
I like the look of KDE Plasma the most.
GNOME vs KDE gang fight has been summoned.
The look of GNOME isn’t the problem of GNOME. ;-) I’m not a good citizen right now.
Absolutely. GNOME often looks better, but it just doesnt work. Basic things everywhere are removed or not added.
One man’s “basic” things are another man’s clutter …
So you mean…
- editing images (in the viewer, screenshot tool)
- being allowed to customize the UI of any app
- changing the login screen (gdm) background
- creating a textfile from the filemanager
- editing .desktop entries graphically
- …
?
Hahaha, I disagree
Yea, none of those things matter to me.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had plenty of fun customizing DEs but I don’t really need that on my daily driver. I also have more of a terminal based workflow so perhaps shell customization scratches that itch for me.
To each their own :)
This is not about customizing. What app do you use for editing images, or dont you do this at all?
On GNOME either using Gwenview (KDE) or GIMP, Krita, Kolourpaint, Pinta would work. Which are all very big programs.
I have given in to GNOME. Set dark mode, install the extension “Tactile” and never touch the setting again.
Well GNOME has issues but in terms of look it’s 69420x better than KDE.
The thing I’ve learned in the many years of watching this fight is that the things Gnome people (of which I am one, though I have immense respect and appreciation for the KDE project) don’t like about KDE tend to be the things KDE people like about KDE and vice versa.
These projects are almost diametrically opposite. GNOME tries to provide a very simple, solid but not very configurable desktop with good accessibility and stability while KDE tries to make a very configurable and powerful environment that can be customized to anyone’s needs. I don’t like KDE because it’s unstable, way too powerful for my personal needs (their “simple by default; powerful when needed” concept doesn’t really work) and I just don’t like the UI. Though KDE’s better performance is an objective advantage.
I tend to agree. I mean, the gnome workflow is more appealing to me (though I have since moved to a WM), but my dislike of KDE comes down to (a) too many options everywhere and (b) it looks too “sharp”. If KDE had an “I’m done fiddling” mode that hid most of the options and I found a softer theme, I’d probably like it fine.
Absolutely nothing I just said should take away from others’ preference for KDE. I’m glad we can like what we like.
I have to agree. I’m hoping Cosmic will be somewhere in-between!
It seems to still be strongly gnome-adjacent, which fits with the softer, “calmer” aesthetic Pop has, but with functional tweaks that are more aligned with Win11/KDE (absolutely intended as a positive statement, as far as moving the ball forward on UX design). I worry that team KDE won’t like the “sane defaults” simplicity that it appears to have inherited from the gnome days, but that might just be the part of me that experiences terminal choice paralysis every time I fire up KDE. :)
Agreed. I think it’s not about distros we should have pay attention, but desktop environments.
And about “most appealing” DE I think it’s subjective. Surely KDE has the most flexible structure and may be exactly what you want, but Gnome is also appealing for some people (myself included).
Again, there is no right or wrong, just personal preferences
My XFCE setup blows Gnome and Plasma out of the window in terms of modern look and usability.
Good for you that you like your XFCE environment
I would like to see how your desktop is, if you don’t mind
However, again, it’s personal preference
Can’t. feddit.de can’t upload images and in browser i suddenly get a server error(?) with my lemmy.ml account.
Well uh, left bar with virtual desktop overview bottom, window buttons top, autoexpand
right bar with network and systemload bars top, sensor numbers bottom, fixed size
top bar Android style with left hand clock and date, whiskermenu (symbol view) as the empty space in the center (title only and whitespaces as title), right hand systray with mail and connman-gtk, pulseaudio plugin. Bars are on intelligently autohide, theme is Adapta.This is on my notebook with touchscreen.
Nice thing is, XFCE can pin bars to specific displays or main display. Meaning, if i plug my ultrawide in, the top bar stays on notebook while left and right bar switch to the ultrawide, a center bar with Wiskermrmu with list view for desktop usage appears.
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.
Manjaro Sway
Linux Mint has a smooth, out-of-your-way look & feel to either MATE or Cinnamon that just makes me feel at home
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.
Logos and soft branding are important for my aesthetic pleasure so I like Fedora GNOME with Papirus icons and Oxygen Blue cursors. Manjaro GNOME, similarly set up, would be my second choice.