Which distro do you find the most visually appealing?

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.
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.
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).
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 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.

Definitely OpenBSD's default fvwm

Heathen!
- TempleOS received mostly "sympathetic" reviews.
  😅
Does OpenBSD really default to FVWM in 2024? Metal.
- Yes, and not even the modern fvwm3, due to licensing issues.
A blast of the past.

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.
I don't like some of the other decisions in Garuda, but it's become hard to get away from it when even regular non-technical people who see it are like "Whoa, what is all that" and you literally just finished installing it and didn't even change the wallpaper. It's a very different feeling from what I'm used to with Linux and I'm into it.
- I don't know why other distros don't offer out-of-the-box rices like this. It's just fun.

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.

The new COSMIC desktop by System76 and Pop!_OS is very promising. I've been running the pre-alpha, and have been very impressed.

The current pop_os dark is already pretty damn good, it's a very refined theme

GNOME

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.

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.

Pop!_OS

Gnome with a bit of a macOS twist. I really like it. I'm excited for Cosmic!

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.

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

You mean Desktop?

Distro, I think Lubuntu does LXQt better than Fedora LXQt.

But LXQt is a huge mix of mostly KDE Theming.

Hardy Heron

Hardy Heron
Ah, I really liked Ubuntu looks in old (4.04 - 8.04) versions. The brown/orange is so much better than the newer gray/purple/red whatever. Since 10.04 the theme and color scheme has been awful.

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.

Garuda Linux looks very nice

Pantheon desktop (Elementary OS)

LMDE (Mint Cinnamon)

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.

Xerolinux. It's basically a heavily themed KDE

Really depends on the desktop but in terms of default desktops that are shipped with distros I'm picking Fedora's GNOME (pretty much stock) and MX Linux's XFCE.

Just installed a USB boot for Mint (cinnamon) and MX (xfce).
Both are so much nicer than I expected.
Trying to figure out how to put together a sub-distro for friends & family that are considering moving away from windows.
MX ranks higher out of the box (comes with VLC installed).

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.

You mean the default setup of the desktop?

...Reminds me of this.

My favourite looking DE is GNOME with the WhiteSur theme and SF-Pro system font

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.

I've seen Gnome spiffed up to a level of polish I'd expect from an Apple commercial. I hate using it, but some folks get it looking nice.

Distros aren't going to be visually appealing as they typically and just standard desktops or CLI

highly subjective

Gentoo.

Mint with Papirus icons and blue accent colour set to match the folder icons of Papirus theme.

elementary! It’s macish, but I still think pantheon is my favorite DE

I tried their icons on KDE (there is a theme) and these old, very detailed icons just dont make sense. Too much color, very incoherent style and way too much detail that you cannot see anyways.
But I have not tried it, as I was too dumb that you need Javascript to have the payment download button work.
- I use the La Capitaine icon pack because I agree, the default icons are pretty meh

Elementary has some very clean sober themes. I fell in the tilling windows craze and ricing so I'm sporting an Arch (I use it btw) with AwesomeWM, so very minimalistic.

DDE?

Logos and soft branding are important for my aesthetic pleasure so I like Fedora GNOME with Papirus icons and Oxygen Blue cursors. Manjaro GNOME, similarly set up, would be my second choice.

Debian with the Awesome WM. I'm biased because that's what I use.

I like the default look of Nitrux

I think that's for Gnome App developers and not for regular users.

Right, looks great BUT... It's a shit
- And also Chinese

Nitrux looks pretty nice

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.

Manjaro Sway

I like simple default, so it is easier to customize. But If I have to keep the default I would say Garuda.

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.

Weird way to misspell desktop environment. Or wm defaults. A gnome reskin isn't a distro.

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.