>>13
Problem is, you need applications, and applications usually run over them, so you'll end up loading libraries from both.
>>12
Libs also have to be loaded on Windows, you know, they don't appear from nowhere when needed like an Anonymous.
Yes, but Linux has a gazillion sets of libraries for everything, and the GUI is more complicated than Windows. Take Gecko (Mozilla, Firefox) as an example. It uses GTK, so you have to load GTK with all its support libraries, widgets and stuff. Then you open your favorite editor, say, Kate, which requires an assload of KDE stuff including QT and its widgets. Under Windows, Mozilla runs on the bare Win32 and requires nothing else, UltraEdit runs on the bare Win32 and requires nothing else, etc.
tweak linux, too (compile it with optimisation flags like said before)
But I didn't recompile anything on Windows (like Firefox). I'm using the stock binaries.
Do you have swap space (with the Unix swap filesystem) ?
Yes, although I shouldn't be needing it, I have 1 GB RAM. (I created just 256 MB of swap partition, I hope it's alright having so much RAM and not running too many applications at once, correct me if wrong and thanks in advance.)
Do you run a ressource hog like KDE with an old computer ?
I'm running KDE, but I have an Athlon XP 3500+ (Venice, 2.2 GHz, 512 KB L2) with plenty of RAM and few loaded applications. My tests were made on the desktop without anything else running in the background.