It’s in the eye of the beholder, of course. But it would be great to see some solid recommendations.
I like simple default, so it is easier to customize. But If I have to keep the default I would say Garuda.
Mint with Papirus icons and blue accent colour set to match the folder icons of Papirus them.
Deepin looks great, I wouldn’t use it but it looks great.
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.
Assuming that the default is good then yes. But some default DEs are ugly as sin, or just hard to use.
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.
Garuda Linux looks very nice
