ok, so I decided to redo my laptop, I ended up putting win8 on it a few months back because reasons, but I set it up to dual boot from the start. I had only really gotten Arch set up about half way so linux was kinda unusable and I never felt like fixing it till now. This time I figured I'd try out Elementary OS it's kinda a fork of ubuntu but not really as they have written the DE, Window Manager, LightDM greeter, ect. themselves from scratch (well, as scratch as you can get in opensource when your useing preexisting tech as your backed.). They have also written themselves a suite of basic costume apps like a file manager, a music player, a separate movie player, a gedit like text editor that isn't horribly broken like the new gedit in GNOME 3.10+, A Terminal that for once doesn't feel flawed in someway (transparency is broken in gnome, konsole in KDE is just plain clunky, XFCE's term while good feels lacking in design.), a Calender app that I actually like for once cause it feels modern instead of stuck in 1998. Whats more they had to clone a few things like the gnome system menu but redid it in a way where it is easily extendable, (believe it or not all the settings panels in GNOME are hard coded with detection, not plugins) and a few other things. on the whole, it is the first linux OS (INCLUDING UBUNTU, MINT, FEDORA) to present a truly coherent feeling of completeness. completeness of both vision and functionality.
Elementary OS is freaking beautiful.
Warning, Large amounts of Kb and Beauty ahead: ShowHide It's designed from the ground up to be beautiful, it developers went so far as to write a NEW WINDOW MANAGER (gala) AND DE (pantheon) JUST for their OS. seriously, GNOME and KDE have kinda been defacto for so long that a new one was kinda out of the question for most dev grops, if you needed something lighter or different you went with lxde of xfce. there are so many DE's out there for linux (GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, LXDE, Mate, Openbox, Awesome, I3, and more) that writing a new one that was actuary different or innovative was grounds enough for me to be a fan.
The result is a combination of GNOME, Ubuntu's Unity, and OSX's classic layout that feels like it own thing. I've finally found a DE I truly LOVE on Linux. (as soon as someone manages to port it over to Arch my desktop is going Panthon too.
TLDR; Elementary OS truly feels like a DESIGNED OS instead of a "combination of parts that works well together" and I'm proud to have it on my laptop.