For a personal laptop:
Fedora on a thinkpad (that’s what most of the core contributors use, which means the laptop drivers and tooling are always up to date).
For general servers: CentOS
For container servers: It’s not even close, Container Linux.
I think that depends on what you mean by "desirable design". Default appearance of the GUI, design of the packages and release schedule, choices in the filesystem structure, configuration in a default install?
obviously it's about overall design, and is asking based on your educated opinion
For me it would be Fedora using Gnome
Elementary & Solus have been doing some very good work
Without systemd: Gentoo and Void Linux!
I’ve never understood the systemd hate. What do you dislike about it?