You can do an experiment for yourself along these lines. A few years ago, I pulled out an old laptop that had Gnome 2.x installed as part of an Ubuntu release from circa 2009. In every respect, the hardware from this machine (which itself had been a budget laptop when it was purchased in 2006) was worse than the hardware I was using in my daily life. I was struck (almost startled), however, by the difference in how immediately it responded to my input compared to my daily driver at the time—to the point that it distracted me from the original reason I booted it up in the first place.
A system capable of running Gnome 2.x is no pre-Mac, pre-multitasking system. In fact, it has all the capabilities/affordances that you'd expect and need from systems today. So your characterization is less than kosher (basically a motte-and-bailey).
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