Beauty is important- Screenshot wars win prizes in tech magazines and flood online forums.

Maybe you got away with Ubuntu and beryl. Maybe you swear by compiz, XGL or AIGLX. Recently I was told – enlightenment is Stone Age. Some may even be twiddling thumbs of what can come out of SUN’s Looking Glass. I can even look good with Gnome and some gdesklets. Beauty is subjective.

Finally I wanted to get down to figure out those Linux distributions with some of the best looking default desktops. And here’s what I found. Hope it helps.

Elive [ http://www.elivecd.org/ ] : Elive is built on top of Debian GNU/Linux and customized to meet your needs for a complete operating system while still offering the user eye-candy, with minimal hardware requirements. Elive comes with a full suite of applications for your work and leisure time needs. It offers everything from a full Office suite to games and Multimedia. You can enjoy watching movies or listening to music. You can even make your own DVD movies with menus, music and it works. Elive gives you the ability to make 3D animations, or compose your own movies in a real-time non-linear video editor from simple videos taken with your video camera. You can edit and manipulate audio and image files for better quality, effects, or design. And to round it all up, Elive has centralized settings and configurations in its own Control Panel called Elpanel.

Elive is not made for newbies. Elive is not made for experienced people. Elive is not made for enterprises or personal user. Elive is art. It is simply for the people who appreciate it and want to use it.

So they say…. heres your screenshot:

DreamLinux:[ http://www.dreamlinux.com.br/ ] Dreamlinux is based on Debian and Morphix, which means it takes advantages of their best features and adds its own modern development tools. Being a modular system Dreamlinux allows you to add new modules comprising your preferred applications and build a new Distro that meet your requirements by means of its revolutionary MKDistro tool. Dreamlinux uses the lightweight Xfce as its default desktop environment, allowing great eye-candy without sacrificing speed.

Ark Linux [ http://www.arklinux.org/ ]: Ark Linux is a Linux distribution for everyone – designed to be easy to install and learn for users without prior Linux (or computer) experience, while powerful enough for longtime Linux users.

The probably most notable difference is the ease of installation and the security system that allows the standard user to get all important tasks done without having to bother with a root account, while not going the easy and wrong way of doing normal work as root.

Sabayon Linux [ http://www.sabayonlinux.org/ ]: Sabayon Linux although based on Gentoo differs from it in that instead of installing the entire system from source code, the initial install is made using packages which are pre-compiled and bundled with the source code. Sabayon Linux uses the Portage system from Gentoo for package management, meaning that all updates and base characteristics are in sync with Gentoo’s portage tree and other mechanisms; thus a user can follow guides and articles written for Gentoo users.

Sabayon offers a complete out-of-the-box experience, it comes with pre-installed media codecs, drivers, and games.

New versions are released in a short amount of time. This means that you don’t have to go through the headaches of updating by hand to the latest and greatest software available. Also, you don’t have to fiddle around with updates, making this distribution that much easier.

Here are more! Some simple, some sleek.

Linux Mint [ http://linuxmint.com/ ]

GoblinX Linux [ http://www.goblinx.com.br/ ]

SAM Linux [ http://sam.hipsurfer.com/news.php ]

Kwort Linux [ http://kwort.org/ ]