Depends on when you tried it and what you mean by them being ugly. I personally prefer fonts and font rendering in GNOME over Windows nowadays, specially in high-ish dpi displays. I haven't opened a single config file since installing Fedora on my machine last year (except for vimrc, emacs.d, etc.), although if you are a power user you might have to play with some CLI once in a while. Selection of distribution and desktop environment is everything, it makes or breaks your Linux experience so take a look around and maybe live boot one through a USB drive to see if ticks your fancies.