Imagine how much better it would run on a similar era version of redhat, gentoo, or beos.
They just proved that the hardware was perfectly capable, in the absolute garbage middle layer-the operating system is what matters about propelling the potential of the hardware forward into a usable form.
Many people may not remember, but there were a few Lins distributions around at the time. Certainly, they would have been able to make better use of the hardware had enough developers worked on it.