But a minimum of 8Gb RAM for a simple media PC seems pretty high. I don’t want bloat – or an OS that requires a discrete GPU. This seems like a good choice for a gaming setup, not a low-spec media file player.

As long as people say why it’s their favorite, that’s fine. In this case, I believe openSUSE is great for you – but I need a bare-bones media file player that I will use for nothing else, so (for this) I can discard it. ;]

I think this is the way I’m going to go. I think KDE Plasma seems pretty cool, maybe Big Screen it.