I’ve dabbled with Linux over the years, first with Ubuntu in the early 2010s, then Elementary OS when that dropped, and a few years ago I really enjoyed how customizable the gui was with Xubuntu. I was able to make it look just like WIndows 2000 which was really cool.
Which current distro has the best GUI, in your opinion? I find modern Ubuntu to feel a little basic and cheap. I guess I don’t really like modern Gnome. I’m currently using Windows 10 LTSC which is probably the best possible version of Windows, but I’d jump to linux if I could find a distro with a gui that feels at least as polished and feature rich as Windows 10 LTSC.
Distro doesn’t really matter nowadays. You can get all desktop environments to work on most distros. Especially the big players like KDE, Gnome, Xfce have hundred distros they are shipped with by default. Most big distros have versions for each of the most popular desktop environments. Therefore, I would suggest that you look for the distro which fits your needs best and then install the desktop environment you want to work with afterwards, if there isn’t a flavor of your distro that ships with it already.
The distro which comes with the best customization in my opinion is Pop!_OS. Simple, clean, straightforward and comes with the POP SHELL which basically simulates a tiling window manager
And the good news is: Pop Shell can be installed on other GNOME based desktops. I’m currently rockin’ it on Manjaro GNOME.
Just trying out OpenSuse microOS currently, as an alternative to Fedora Kinoite, and the installer doesnt even load.
I dont like Ubuntus variant of Gnome. I think GNOME can look good but its apps are often horrible. Mint has a better set of simple but powerful tools.
But I would stay with anything rocking KDE. I recommend fedora Kinoite fro ublue.it (better video previews and working RPM firefox basically), its a really great distro.
I like to use good ol’ stable Debian with i3-gaps as a window manager.
Any distro where I can easily replace the default with sway.
Deepin is great too. Unfortunately it is not fully translated so that you come across Chinese quite often.