It's in the eye of the beholder, of course. But it would be great to see some solid recommendations.
The new COSMIC desktop by System76 and Pop!_OS is very promising. I've been running the pre-alpha, and have been very impressed.
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.
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.
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.
Linux Mint has a smooth, out-of-your-way look & feel to either MATE or Cinnamon that just makes me feel at home
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.
Pop!_OS
Gnome with a bit of a macOS twist. I really like it. I'm excited for Cosmic!
As one comment mentioned, it depends more on the DE. But out of the box, I’d say Peppermint, Elementary, and Mint.
I loved Peppermint. Has it been updated/does it work?
Used to use it but it crapped out on me and last couple of versions haven't worked or had printer issues.
Out of the box, I love Vanilla OS's color scheme and wallpaper, with Fedora in second place for a default Gnome environment. I like the Pop_OS theme. I use River WM with a gruvbox theme (Vivaldi with no open tabs pictured), which is about as far from out of the box as you can get. Incidentally, I've been team light theme forEVER, but I've switched with gruvbox.
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