On the Mac side I think I'd go up to at least 10.5/10.6 for its native virtual desktop implementation (Spaces) that's actually better than modern Spaces by way of being a 2D grid instead of a single row.
Other things that may not be noticeable to most people but matter to others may also have improved, such as audio latency; I don't know how e.g. Pipewire or PulseAudio compares to plain ALSA in terms of that, but at least plain ALSA apparently wasn't enough for audio work back then because there was Jack, and I'm also under the impression that latency and responsivity in general have improved a lot on the kernel level as well, and not just in terms of audio.
Open source graphics drivers have also improved a lot over the years. Perhaps the entire graphics stack has, or perhaps overhauls of the stack have facilitated some of the improvements in the drivers themselves, but I don't have enough expertise to judge that.
Improvements (or degradation) in performance are rarely something that happens evenly across the board.
In that case, I doubt it. You probably couldn't even use all your RAM. Linux back then also supported only a single processor (if it boots at all): symmetric multiprocessing support was added in 1996.
Linux had the recommended API as OSS, alsa, pulse ... In the same time frame FreeBSD just had OSS and it still works pretty well.
That's a name I haven't heard in a long long time haha
Whoa, the memories to NDISWrapper. And 802.11g