Firstly, you are not going to get support for the AR8161 out-of-the-box in any distro. It's so new that the driver is still in the testing stage:
http://www.joshzam.com/2013/04/ather...oller-drivers/
As for the other stuff, it's either a case of "they've all got it" (well, Ubuntu's Unity won't let you move the panel) or of "customise it". You don't like Unity , Gnome, or KDE? — get Mate or Xfce and customise.
Personally, so long as the software works well and the GUI is readable, I couldn't care less about themes. Luckily Linux will cope with both of us!