dude, having high system requirements is a must now adays. Lets face it, less your running from a commandline, or using a barebones OS (Gentoo, slack, etc.) you just shouldent be expecting high eyecandy modern performance.
I have been using alot of win98 and RedHat lately, and while I don't like windowz at all (save a few nifty fetures that I give M$ credit for) I can definetly say I love how snappy and responsive stuff is. And it's not that OSX isn't snappy, it's just that it has lots of eyecandy filler stuff going on with things growing, shrinking, becomeing transparent etc. in Win98, and indeed Mac OS 9 you double click on something and up it pops.
This has become my major comlaint with OSX, not being able to turn off the eyecandy. You can do it in RedHat and Windoze, but not OSX.
Redhat it'self if is a bloated resource hog, but I like it
best, most stable linux I have ever used. OSX is still my fav. OS of all time, so don't you folks get any ideas about Psyax, Im still a total MacHead.
Just needed to do some PC programming lately.