Hans tried out Plasma after we talked about it...

I went for KDE Neon as they promise cutting edge KDE versions on a stable base OS. It took me ages to get it to install correctly with my custom partition setup and in the end I had to chroot in from the live version to manually fix /etc/crypttab.

Anyway, here I am now having used it for a few days and - my younger self would probably kick me in the nuts for saying this - I love it! The default installation consumes a mere 100MB more RAM than my previous Xfce desktop. I have a 2013 Acer Laptop, low-end and dated from the day it's been build, and the performance feels just as good as on Xfce.

But really the best thing, like you said, is the customisability. By default it comes with a lot of bells and whistles and that Windows look but you can easily turn it into a very minimal experience. Animations, panel widgets, toolbars and what not, you can all tweak or disable it.

KDE has come such a long way from when I last tried it so thanks a ton for recommending it!

On another note, I felt for you, Chris, when you were struggling with macOS consuming all your network bandwidth during the recording of last week's episode. A few years ago I had a somewhat similar experience. 

I was on a business trip abroad and my work MacBook ground to a halt as soon as I connected to the hotel's WiFi which was as shady as their service, providing sub-EDGE speed. I force-rebooted but now it hung on start-up because it was still trying to connect to that WiFi network to up- or download God knows what. It took me several attempts to bring it back up and disconnect the network.

I totally agree that it's super frustrating when the OS gives you no insights into what it's doing let alone any control to limit or influence it's behavior. Macs are great hardware, the OS works well for a lot of people but if you want it to behave differently even just a tiny bit, you're often screwed.

And now you can't even store your kiddie nude pics on them anymore. Brave new world. (Disclaimer: I don't have any kiddie nude pics, I just feel that scanning my photos for whatever is an obvious infringement of my privacy.)

Best
Hans