Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder anyways. I don't think most of these mentioned are ugly (except for the default Windows XP theme). I prefer XFCE since it starts up faster than Gnome and KDE. Damn fast I would say with just the default things loaded. It also uses less memory than Gnome and less than KDE for sure. From reading this thread I installed fluxbox and am on it right now. I had been thinking it was something dinky WM with nothing on it, like some others I've tried (might as well go pure command line). I'm going back to XFCE. I'm not liking it for these reasons: it starts up slower, I think even a bit slower than Gnome and doesn't even have a splash screen, you're just there guessing if you can't hear the hard disk working. The menus are barren. I guess you have to configure everything yourself, and I'm guessing unless you script something up yourself, there is no dynamic menu loading like in the others? Another thing, the workspaces behave strangely. Like if you open gkrellm and have it as a panel, only one workspace will show it but windows will maximize to respect it in all workspaces. Big icons get cut sideways in the notification area. I'm not liking the look of it either. Just some dull blue with an empty gray background. I wouldn't call it ugly, but to me, a spifly themed GUI that remains fast and starts up fast and is easily configured right from it's GUI is more of a thing of beauty. But like I said, it's in the eyes of the beholder.