Gnome still leaks and Nautilus is still an old asthmatic tractor though. Nautilus is 50% of the reasons why I switched to kubuntu and I still keep on using awesome-wm when sysadmining. edit: Now that I think about it I also upgraded to an SSD some months after switching to KDE so maybe gnome is way snappier on that same machine and I wouldn't feel the same about it.
Frankly, I seem to remember the KDE harware thing is like 15 years old.
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=212094
And all that problems still appear strange to me, as the computer is not too old, it just has slower processor, whereas I've had better experience playing videos on the notebook bought in 2000, in Windows XP (using open source mplayer!)
And using some of the "lighter" editions apparently doesn't mean "plays better" just... something (as some don't even have an official goal anymore to be actually better on older hardware).
Maybe someone here can explain what is the best way to play videos on slower (from a perspective of the developers who probably have 500 W graphic cards, because "who doesn't"?) machines. I have, more or less, accepted that I still can't expect that from Linuxes:
Relevant: https://xkcd.com/619/