I don't think it unreasonable for linux distributions released today to use the same amount of resources as current windows distributions today. The other issue is that every distribution out of the box, including windows is not optimized. They are setup with a lot of unnecessary services running. After tweaking these settings all the distributions will run on less resources. The more we stray towards eye candy the more resources systems are going to use. You want to use something light use blackbox/openbox windows managers on linux. Watch your system respond then.
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I don't think it unreasonable for linux distributions released today to use the same amount of resources as current windows distributions today. The other issue is that every distribution out of the box, including windows is not optimized. They are setup with a lot of unnecessary services running. After tweaking these settings all the distributions will run on less resources. The more we stray towards eye candy the more resources systems are going to use. You want to use something light use blackbox/openbox windows managers on linux. Watch your system respond then.