loiakdsf

First of all, you need to distinguish between a desktop environment and a distro. a distro by itself doesn’t have any looks, that is up to the desktop environment mostly. Secondly, you assume that the goal is attracting lots of users, which might be true for purely profit driven conpanies such as microsoft or apple, but linux mostly comprises of open source projects put together. only a few of the maintainers have the ultimate goal of attracting more and more users. they have an intrinsic motivation to create a cool project and hope it finds attraction by function instead of form.

now, what i reallylike about your post is that you do not just rant but want to get into solving exactly that problem. in my limited experience, loads of work go into designing a consistent UI that is just as functional as it is beautiful. hats off to you if you can really do it, but prepare for a rough ride, because UX mistakes are one of the first things to attracting users’ dissatisfaction which makes it a very unthankful job.

if you really want to get started, try first thinking about theoretical stuff: color schemes, usage paradigms, user stories and a general concept you want to adhere to, before you even start drawing some wireframes. UX design also requires rigorous testing from various different points of view and for most developers, it is just not worth putting that much effort in just to have “a little” less users complaining and instead calling the interface pretty (again: function over form).

also another reason might be the terminal affinity of devs that has them leaning away from UI, because a CLI is enough for a start.

i wouldnt call mint cinnamon the ugliest distro/DE pairing like other commenters, but i get that people looking for the prettiest desktop are prolly looking elsewhere.

you can set up collabora without nextcloud, as well

i find the latex fonts weird to deal with. for me it is more a thing of setting up your template the way you want it and keep sailing with that.

edit: typo

you could have a look at etherpad. seems pretty cool and is extensible with plugins. i don’t know about resource consumption and security aspects, tho, because i don’t personally use it. there are also a few publicly usable instances to test it out (see their github). keep in mind, however, that those come with plugins and do not reflect the vanilla state of the tool.