It’s in the eye of the beholder, of course. But it would be great to see some solid recommendations.
GNOME
I like the default look of Nitrux
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 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.
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. :)
Absolutely. GNOME often looks better, but it just doesnt work. Basic things everywhere are removed or not added.
I have given in to GNOME. Set dark mode, install the extension “Tactile” and never touch the setting again.
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.
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.
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 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 looked amazing.
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).
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
☯️
You don’t need much to make something look fancy or modern. Even XFCE can look modern.
edit: made it less offensive.
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.
Gentoo.
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.
Debian with the Awesome WM. I’m biased because that’s what I use.
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.
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 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.
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.
It’s dead now, but Apricity was the first distro I really enjoyed the look of. Now I know better than to care about out of box appearance.
Out of the box experience is valuable though. No every user wants to tinker for an afternoon to make a system suit their needs. Some want to install and go, nothing wrong with that.
Out of box experience is a personal preference. It always has been. Every person expects something different so I don’t really care about it anymore.
deepin or zorin
Linux Mint has a smooth, out-of-your-way look & feel to either MATE or Cinnamon that just makes me feel at home
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I think that’s for Gnome App developers and not for regular users.
