L et’s get something out of the way from the beginning – some of these desktops adopt a ‘hacker’ aesthetic. There’s nothing wrong with this in itself, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of normal functionality. There’s even something to be said for the desktops that don’t bother with a hacker look because it means that they are easier to use unobtrusively. We’re not going to mark up or down either way. Just bear in mind that some of these desktops make it look as though you’re hacking something.
These distributions are designed to be occasional or secondary use systems rather than daily drivers, so we prefer to see a standard desktop and window layout to something that has to be learnt from scratch or that might be confusing when first encountering it. They aren’t daily drivers, but we expect these desktops to offer all of the usual facilities, such as a full file manager and a searchable application launcher that pops up when we press the Super key.