I am sorry but OSX on a 700Mhz G4 is slow and the paging the OS does with virtual memory is pretty lame. The problem is the Mac interface now sits over Unix which has a pretty big memory requirement to do mac like things..
I have a friend who has a G4 Mac with this configuration and he still uses MacOS 9 because it's faster than OSX which is crippled if you don't have a lot of memory and a faster processor. His machine just crawls..
It's my humble opinion that on that same G4 (or even a G3) that BeOS and MorphOS, and AmigaOS run faster because they have a smaller footprint. I would include AROS in there too which could be booted an ran off a floppy still..
The reality of today's OS, you need lots of memory and a fast processor.
We all have different views on what acceptable performance is today. Most people in the USA today for instance go out and buy a 2-3 gigahertz Intel box that runs faster.. So most people have gotten over the fact you need globs of memory and a fast CPU because they are cheap and affordable. That's the problem with the PowerPC/G4/G5 value proposition.. The rest of the world knows better about it's performance and speed..
