Hey guys

Ok basically, im curious about distro's that people have come across in there time that would be considered "beautiful" ok i know its an odd word to use. but im talking about artwork that has gone into the setup of the distro. special distro specific themes. setups etc

One that i loved was eLive. there custom theme. placement, preinstall applications made it feel very "media" friendly. and beautiful to boot up into with some nice intro music haha

Really disappointing that elive make you pay to install there distro

Basically distro's in which when u login and load up its made you go "wow that looks cool"

This is just a friendly discussion post btw, not a distro recommendation thread or which is the best

CrunchBang, the "little black dress" of Linux.

Well, beauty, after all, is in the eye of the beholder. Eye-candy and other fancy-schmancy stuff does tend to eat memory and processor time that might be better used for... whatever you're trying to work on, perhaps?

I'm usually more concerned about how much updating gets downloaded and how often -- I live in the boonies and my only viable source for internet connection is satellite. It's fast enough for daily use but it does throttle if too much stuff gets pumped at me in a given 24-hour period (mumble, grumble). I install from CD-ROM or DVD so I don't hit the limit switch and get throttled down to dial-up speeds. The "pretty" distributions, in my experience anyway, tend to pump too much stuff at me too often, so I avoid them. Doing a clean install of Win7 in VirtualBox means roughly 190+ updates before it's usable just for comparative purposes.

I prefer simple and elegant, stable and reliable. Don't like to fiddle around, would rather just get on with what I have the blasted servers for in the first place -- doing work that needs doing. For this, I rely on Slackware, an ncurses-based install (nope, doesn't start X running, no eye-candy, just get the job done quickly and efficiently). If I want pretty pictures I can do that but I'm looking at a black screen with no more than five icons cluttering things up and GKrellM running in the lower right-hand corner showing me what's going on with the CPUs, processes, disk activity, Ethernet activity, memory, and swap space. Not everybody's taste for sure but it fits my needs; I shut down KDE in favor of XFCE simply because KDE has gotten so bloated that it can't get out of its own way (and GNOME is worse yet).

Your mileage, of course, may vary.

Hope this helps some.

Given that Elive was an Enlightenment distro, you could try Bodhi/Bloathi, which are also Enlightenment-based.

In general, for whichever GUI is to your taste, a similar selection of wallpapers, widgets, plasmoids, etc, etc will be available for all distros, if you want to go to the effort of finding and installing them, so it seems to be a more a 'Do you prefer KDE/Gnome/XFCE/etc?' question than a distro one, unless you mean just the default appearance. Some distros are better at this than others, but if you are really determined, getting away from the default appearance wouldn't detain you for all that long.

The Salix Fluxbox that I installed on my netbook had a couple of truly striking default wallpapers.

They weren't to my taste--I like pictures of scenery and other real life things, but they were still very nice.

I always though BackTrack, both KDE & Gnome, were quite striking. I know they're supposed to run off of a flashdrive although you can install it and use it as an everyday OS. I wouldn't do it though. I also quite like the Fedora 16 default wallpaper.

I just installed PearOS in VirtualBox.

The default MacOS style interface is really neat. Not my thing, but really neat.

Slackware - the beauty lies in it's simplicity.

I much prefer the beauty of Slackware to more "advanced" GUI configuration options, and eye candy. Slackware's beauty lies in it's simple straight forwardness. When you want to get real work done simplicity beats eye candy any day.

In my humble opinion the beauty of Linux in its configurability. Not a single distribution looks half as good as any distro looks once you create a custom login screen, wallpaper rotation, conky overlay, cairo-dock, and rss new ticker.

Essentially, the beauty of Linux comes from the effort you put into it to customize it to your needs. Much like a maddeningly challenging video game, the love [the cult] itself derives from the satisfaction you get once you start to understand and control it!

1 members found this post helpful.

thund3rstruck: these are really true words fortunately you're a very qualified geek. By my side I'm a 67 retired rookie in Linux as well in Windows and try to understand their philosophies. I'm using ZorinLinux (alike Windows GUI) and Win Seven as main OS. By the way as I see you're Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD) I dare to ask you a question. I'm only user/administrator and I have only one icon to my starting ID, but now when I start/restart there are two icons one for Admin and the other my name as Admin also. I cannot do anything from users folder, is there a solution? Thanks.
PS.: If my question is out-placed posted, please tell me, this is my first post.

No sweat. Send me a PM though because I'd hate to hijack this thread.

Beautiful to me, at least for the purposes of linux, means simple, solid, configurable, and low on distro specific gotchas. Given those criteria Vector Linux wins over all the distros i have tried. The default X login screen and theme are pretty cool too.

gday. I don't use it, but I think fedora makes a particularly nice looking distro. I have pinched several wallpapers that were made for fedora and used them on my distro of choice.
I like it that they don't brand there wallpapers. I hate branded wallpaper.

on another note, I think cent os has the nicest splash screen: its plain but nice.

thund3rstruck: sorry but I don't find PM option. Where's it?

PMs are only enabled for senior members (which means you have to have at least 150 posts to use them).