FWIW I've been running KDE Neon on an older Intel NUC, sporting an i5-4250U and 8GB RAM. For normal usage like surfing the web, writing documents, file management, email and watching YouTube it has behaved very well.

Obviously the CPU is a bit anemic which is noticeable when you do CPU heavy stuff like watching non-h264 videos on YouTube, but otherwise it's been very smooth and functional.