Elive

Elive has spent close to two decades refining a single, cohesive vision around the Enlightenment window manager/desktop: elaborate visual effects, custom themes, and a strikingly designed interface that historically ran surprisingly well on modest hardware, a combination few other distributions attempted. Rather than a general-purpose desktop that happens to look nice, its whole identity is built around Enlightenment specifically, giving it a level of visual and interaction-design polish around that one desktop that broader multi-desktop distributions rarely match for any single option. It has historically funded development partly through a paid stable-release model (with free unstable builds also available), an unusual approach among community Linux distributions.