The distro I came here to mention has been hated on already. My dislike goes to the distros that start off fine, and somehow screw it up.
Honestly, I remember using Manjaro ages ago. It had an official Openbox spin (not a community thing). I had already used Arch but I didn’t even check to see what it was based on when I tried. I thought, “green is nice” and it was. It very quickly became less nice. I didn’t use it after that, but I’ve heard plenty of hate since then.
I’m going to put another one out there just for fun.
Distrowatch’s n°1… MX Linux
Nothing wrong with it, but the fact that it is number 1 (I know their ranking is just for fun and based on page hits) and doesn’t deserve it is the issue. It works great, when I used it I didn’t like how there was a second application for installating certain software. I think I used the Xfce setup. Again, it’s fine, but if a first-time Linux desktop user sat down and installed that, it might not be the best initiation.
Popular and highly ranked distros give Desktop Linux a bad name sometimes is what I’m saying.