I wish one of the major Linux distributions would double down on design as a core priority (as in, bring in designers and give them serious pull). I'd kill for a beautiful, opinionated, and novel Linux desktop environment.
Beyond that, there are many projects that I feel meet your criteria: Enlightenment, Deespin, Sugar, etc.
And, of course, you can go ask the folks at i3 or wmii for an opinion, I bet they will be happy to give you several.
That's the mistake. You bring in UX experts (who also happened to understand your primary users)
Graphics design != UX
That would be the hard part...
Personally not my cup of tea, but you might enjoy it.
- Graphics designers are not necessarily qualified UI (or "UX") designers - UX designers are not necessarily qualified UX designers - Qualified UX designers are not necessarily qualified designers of an OS UI. Most UX work you can get is essentially applying a few simple principles to yet another implementation of a CRUD app.
I've only seen Linux distros make "design" progress on these fronts:
- Eye candy: making things shake, glow, blink, blah, whatever. This is often pointless, and can exacerbate issues with hardware. - Terrible "modern design" copycatting: making fonts and buttons really huge and interfaces empty with no real clue what someone is going to use it for. KDE Neon's package manager sticks out as a bad offender I saw recently - Out of box setup: releasing something that has all the batteries included. Unfortunately, this also pretty much guarantees: it has software on it you don't need; it has software on it you don't want; it has software on it that will break at some point; understanding and customizing it will be treacherous and nigh impossible.
You can go two ways: make a single/narrow purpose system, or make a general purpose system. Linux is great for single/narrow purpose systems, since it's all pieces you can pick and choose at your will. Of course, that won't work as a general computer.
For a general purpose system, I think we need to stop trying to pretend that it's easy or can work out of the box and start accepting the fact that it's difficult and provide people the tools and documentation to handle it.
I'm reminded of the Bremerton Ferry Terminal.
http://www.clinkstonarchitects.com/project/1/Bremerton_Trans...
It's attractive and all but that pretty canopy is turned up in the direction where the the rain and wind normally comes from and the seats which have these neat looking glass tops with embedded fish and octipi etc sculptures are not only uncomfortable, they also have a bar in the center presumably designed to stop homeless from sleeping on them which also stops more than 2 people from sitting and the glass has a lip which causes the rain the canopy lets in collect on the seats making them utterly useless at least 1/3 of the time.