MyNameIsRichard

I dare you to say that in Wales

I don't know if openSUSE Tumbleweed counts as a less popular distro but it's certainly underrated. I chose it with a roll of the dice and stayed because it's bloody good.

I landed on openSUSE Tumbleweed about five years ago and still don't see myself hopping to another one

Plasma definitely. Xfce is second.

Am I just old or is 4GB actually loads of RAM?

I remember upgrading my Atari STe to 4MB (yes MB) of RAM and thinking "I'll never use that much". Now I have 32GB and I probably will use it.

Pulsar is the continuation of Atom

For all their faults, Microsoft are rather good at languages and the tooling around them.

Conky. It should be in your repos.

I can't say that I've noticed any lag but I haven't been looking for it.

I have a Nvidia GPU and find the Plasma / Xorg experience to be fine. Plasma / Wayland is shocking though.

I think it's mostly do with the carelessness of the devs. They've let their certificates expire multiple times (and suggested their users put their clocks back as a workaround) and DDOSed the AUR a couple of times by accident. To be fair, I haven't heard of any foul ups in a long time so maybe they're being more careful now.