It’s in the eye of the beholder, of course. But it would be great to see some solid recommendations.
Distros aren’t going to be visually appealing as they typically and just standard desktops or CLI
Definitely OpenBSD’s default fvwm
Anything with GNOME is visually appealing but unfortunately the usability is pure garbage. KDE is the exact opposite and Xfce is quick but sits on an awkward place.
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
