Current distributions, I like EndeavourOS sway edition and Window Maker Live (wmlive).
Historically, I liked HP-UX and OpenSolaris with Gnome and the Nimbus theme. Linux Mint Darnya was nice. So was OpenSUSE 9.3 I think with Gnome and its custom launcher. Red Hat Enterprise Linux / Scientific Linux 6 was nice looking. We went a couple of years without CentOS so everyone used SL6.
Congrats. First of all this really made me feel old … Skylake seems recent to me and that’s the year my kid was born. But secondly, this reminds me of those people who used to post in /r/debian about having like 20 years on the same install and they just kept changing the hardware and if a drive ever got replaced they used dd to clone from one drive to another without reinstalling. So when they would do something like stat /, it would be something like 2002 that the filesystem was created. I think those people/stories are awesome.
I think our expectations are pretty jacked up here because that’s how all the operating systems I remember are. Just pull the drive and plug it in another computer. From the DOS days to the BSD world. It’s only Windows and macOS that are the outliers here with their “trusted computing” bullshit. They created the problem with tying the install to the hardware, and then they sold the solution of backing up to their cloud for a monthly subscription if your hardware ever just died.