
Being a BeOS user (a purely desktop system) and because I code under Linux, I see
XFree86 (v4.1 on my machine) as a user and as a developper. And this is where the problem lies. My Gnome or KDE desktops are slow in comparison with other operating systems, but XFree86, the 'engine' behind these desktops, proves me that it's not. Let's look at what I have in front of me: a dual Pentium III at 933Mhz with 512MB of memory, a Radeon 32 AIW, a modified Mandrake 8.0 powered by kernel 2.4.18.
The Amiga 500 ran a 68000 Motorolla processor at 7.14MHz, not 14MHz. It also came with half a megabyte of ram, although later on this was moved to 1mb and older 1/2mb models could be upgraded to 1mb (the size of an Amiga 500 512kb memory chip was large than a mouse!).