I have been using the standard Ubuntu Linux with the GNOME interface for a while with my small eeeBox.
The Atom processor got exhausted rather fast just running a browser, chat client and satellite tracking program.
Switch the desktop from Gnome to XFce, a lightweight desktop environment, and bingo, things run faster and the processor does not run into the 100% barrier. Looks like I will configure the XFce a bit, but that is a small price to pay for some speed.
Of course – it does not look as sleek as the other desktop, but I want functionality, not eye candy.
There is a lot of room to gain performance even in Linux these days, I have to agree with that. Back when I was running Fedora the first thing I did after any upgrade/install was kill all the useless services it insisted on starting by default, whether I wanted it to or not.
Killing stuff like nfsd (I wasn’t running any networked file systems on that box) and anacron (not that necessary for a box running 24/7) would generally kill at least half of its on-boot memory use, and shave quite a bit off the boot time as well.
Yes, for a real low end machine I might look into running a simple WM and just one or 2 programs – a dedicated machine of sorts.