Gnome does indeed look better out of the box, but I am not in favour of installing extensions for customization. This is something that KDE shines at, with loads of options to tweak appearance and behaviour. XFCE and other tiling managers, I've tried briefly but I always find myself reverting back to Plasma desktop. Without a unifying force behind Linux desktop (Freedesktop helped to some degree), I have come to accept that things will always be shaky in desktopland - the price of freedom of choice.