Well of course it'll run faster, its linux. It has like half as much stuff running in the background. You have to remember, windows is made to be user-friendly and to work perfectly out of the box. It fulfills it's purpose when taking that into consideration.

I agree vista was a resource hog and needed lots of optimisation. But windows 7 runs fine for me, has way less resources being used on average and looks nicer.

On a side note, i'd prefer some kind of debian or maybe a redhat distro over suse. No reason why, just preference. I have compiz running on ubuntu (debian) at the minute and yes, it is good but so is aero.

Oh and also, im not trying to say windows is better, I actually prefer linux a lot of the time, but windows deserves to be given at least SOME credit.