I have a general question about Linux performance...

I am running Redhat 8.0 on a Dell 400MHz, 128MB system (OptiPlex) with an
8MB ATI Rage Pro Video card.  I have a fairly basic workstation installation, with
SSHd, ftpd, telnetd, apached, and a couple other services running.  Gnome seems
to take forever to open windows/applications.  It can be on the order of 10 seconds
to a minute for some applications to come up.  (Mozilla is one of the worst, even
to just bring up a local file as the home page for the browser)

Is Gnome just a very slow GUI, or is there something that I can do to speed up my
system??

I know of several (5-6) people who have installed RedHat 7.2...8.0 on Dell and Sony
systems (all CPU are 866MHz+) with Gnome or KDE and the performance has been
very slow in the GUI.  Even with a higher end 1.5GHz CPU/512MB RAM system.

Is there a Linux distribution that has a standard GUI that is very responsive?  Is Redhat
just too bulky to run quickly, or do I need to download a better GUI for Redhat?

With Windows2000, this system was very responsive, and the other people I know
about are running XP, which is so much faster that they run XP most of the time now.

Thanks,
jeff