Why is it that I always hear about how windows is so bloated when kde 
and esp. gnome can take up even more space?  how did people run linux 
with X five years ago and what happened so they can't with the same 
computer now?

recently I was looking around at free beos clones, there's a community 
doing this centered at http://beunited.org.  most of them actually use 
linux and X to make their os.  I heard many of them talking about how 
bad linux is for a graphical desktop and they can run their beos clones 
on old computers very quickly.  apparently, some have found ways to make 
X run much faster.  I haven't tried them out yet, but this is something 
to check out, I'm not sure if there's binary or source compatability 
with linux.  I've also heard that freebsd is faster on the desktop than 
linux.

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