I’ve been using Fedora Atomic on at least one device for years now, without any major issues (I.e. device no booting or updating. Upgrades do require some manual intervention).
I upgraded with rpm-ostree upgrade and then it doesnt boot. Some error with the kernel. Im sorry I dont have the info where I am, as it is not my computer. Good thing is I can still boot old image, its on grub.
You could give FydeOS a shot. It’s based on ChromiumOS so if you like the ChromeOS experience, you’ll get to keep it. I believe it also has Linux app support and optional Android app support.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fedora Atomic is greag. uBlue is better ootb, but most of it can be simply achieved by layering some packages (rpm-fusion, enable auto updates through /etc/rpm-ostreed.conf).
NixOS is a whole nother beast and I’d only recommend it if you use standalone compositors (labwc, hyprland, sway, wayfire, river, …), or want a declarative system.
Edit: Just read your comment about not liking Fedora. In that case I’d recommend OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Other immutable distros are smaller and I don’t have any experience with them. (IMO with atomic distros the distro doesn’t matter much because apps are installed through flatpak or distrobox anyway.(
I don’t have anything important to back up, I would just like to avoid reinstalling everything, particularly my Steam library.
If I can save myself the trouble, that’s all I want. I know Windows doesn’t like that kind of upgrades and you end up with a ton of useless drivers sitting around for nothing, but I haven’t been on Windows in a couple years.
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