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.
I’ve been using Opensuse Aeon just over a year and it’s done great.
Tumbleweed user for the last 5 years, and dealt with a few issues over that time. The usually infrequent update break that comes with rolling release. And the Opensuse ‘Patterns’ started, which I loathe and it’s a disaster to try to disable them every install.
Aeon hasn’t had any of those issues. It’s been very much a “turn it on and get to work”.
I’ve generally had less issues with Aeon than Tumbleweed - like certain flatpaks not crashing.
But downsides as I see them:
I’m not a gnome guy. It’s fine though, I don’t hate it. But some people can’t stand it.
I had a bit of trouble running wine. Something about the default security policy. There’s a known workaround.
Kalpa needs to attract more developers to keep up with Aeon’s pace. I understand it is usable as a daily driver, but it’s not just a one to one mirror of Aeon with Plasma on top.
Richard Brown is all in on Aeon along with whatever contributors are helping him. Stephen Falken appears to have no one helping him work on Kalpa unfortunately. I disagree with Richard’s stance that Kalpa shouldn’t exist, but I do wish there were some capable people able to help that project.
I don’t mind using Gnome anyway, it actually does solve some networking issues that I’ve always had with Plasma. (Dolphin not handling it well whilst Gnome Files has no issues)
Current distributions, I like EndeavourOS sway edition and Window Maker Live (wmlive).
Historically, I liked HP-UX and OpenSolaris with Gnome and the Nimbus theme. Linux Mint Darnya was nice. So was OpenSUSE 9.3 I think with Gnome and its custom launcher. Red Hat Enterprise Linux / Scientific Linux 6 was nice looking. We went a couple of years without CentOS so everyone used SL6.
I did the same thing last week on Fedora 40 with the latest kernel at the time. Everything went fine.
Had to fiddle with bios settings to get the performance out of the cpu/memory
Also worth noting there’s a delay in boot with no feedback on screen initially where the memory is tested/trained. That blank screen made me panic a bit
linux
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.