How can you a get a beautiful desktop with clear, crisp display of images in applications, smooth sharp videos and perfect colour schemes? Good multimedia handling is important. Which of these does it depend on: the distribution, the desktop manager, the graphics card hardware or other factors? Can any linux distribution be made to look like any other distribution in this regard? Thanks for your opinion.

Of all the distros I've tried, I think Linux Mint seems to have the best OOTB experience, as far as looks and functionality goes. It even plays Quicktime videos in Firefox. Font rendering is a big issue with many distros; any distro utilizing Infinality OOTB typically has pretty good looking fonts.

Most any distro can be brought up to par, though. I think the reason many are looking for a replacement for Xorg, with the likes of Wayland and Mir, are for this very reason - Xorg may be reaching its limit as to what can be rendered on screen. Certainly Apple has done an amazing job making BSD beautiful with the Quartz rendering engine, Retina, etc.

All Linux distribution /except Ubuntu with its Unity) use the the same desktop environments or window managers, so in the end you can set up any distro to look and behave like any other distro. On most distros you will have to install multimedia packages that can, due to patent or licensing issues, not be part of the default install, but usually that is a no-brainer.

I tried Bodhi Linux for a time last year and thought its Enlightenment desktop was lovely. I've forgotten now which theme I picked at the time, and I can't say anything about its multimedia performance. More recently, I tried PinguyOS, and it provided a good multimedia experience as well as an interesting "live" desktop. I'd still have it running but I tried dual-booting that computer with Arch and ended up with only Arch functioning. Still, if you're able to hop around a little to test out distros, I'd recommend them both.

For eye appeal, it's not the distro, it's the desktop environment.

I have been using E17 (Enlightenment 0.17.x) lately and have been quite taken with it.

But much of the eye appeal is in what you do to configure your environment. I'm a long-time Fluxbox user. Fluxbox is quite drab, maybe even beyond drab, out of the box, but, with a little bit of study and few lines of typing, it can be quite stunning.

I do have to say that, out of the box, Snowlinux is one of the prettiest I've seen, but I have no interest in using it.

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I have tried to visually compare video playback in mint, arch, debian-wheezy, pclinux and slackware and I found slackware video playback to be near perfect. Others have shown occassional hiccups in video and/or audio. Is it just a chance finding or others have also found slackware video playback to be very good?

Of course, it is possible to configure any distribution to be visually attractive. In my experience, Linux Mint and Bodhi Linux look very attrative out of the box.

I have found that to be the case, too. With all the crowing from the usual distros about how good video is, I have found Slackware to be the best.

If you want "all ready" maybe Linux Mint is ok for you.
But every distro can be as you want

I just noticed that the Going Linux podcast just came out with episode on customizing the desktop. They talk about several different desktop environments:

http://goinglinux.com/shownotes.html#glp203

It's a good introduction to the topic.

Hello

Personally, I think the old saying "beauty lies in the eye of the beholder" would come into play here, as I'm sure there are some command line only users that would claim their distro of choice to be the most beautiful. That said, you can make pretty much any distro look like another, so distro choice doesn't really matter if you have a knack for customizing your own Linux system.

Good luck to you with it...

I recently found Hybryde after somebody posted it on here. The default desktop environments (it has about 6) are all set up to look quite pretty. It is a little rough around the edges though and could probably benefit from a tiny bit of tweaking in places looks-wise. I've not played with it enough to know how it performs but a 720p YouTube video played smoothly on an instance running in VirtualBox.

It depends your nature of work. if you are trying to convert a movie into another format or going to cut it or printing watermark on it(As you are talking about multimedia) and your beautiful editing tool takes an hour (may be after an hour the output can be corrupted) but using a command line tool, if it takes hardly 20 minutes, Is the question still available to ask?

If you are searching beauty in desktop manager then I think themes are beautiful not the managers.

You might heard a story about inner beauty, Here you can apply the moral.

The beauty lies inside, that black screen is most beautiful than any other screen in the world.

May be you see it seldom when you see initramfs error, Error 15: file not found, kernel panic, No boot device found
and you don't want to see it never but OZAR said true

and I believe in it too.

Mint, I don't like Unity at all.

Personally I'd say any distro using Enlightenment is going to look the best but just about any distro will have Enlightenment packages in their repos. so that's not distro specific.
So in my opinion the Desktop Environment is the main contributor to the look of your system. There are a few things like custom icons some distros provide or superior fonts others might include as well that might slightly effect you user experience.
But all in all it's all about the DE.