I used OS2 a lot, both version 2.1 and later Warp 3 back then. While it was really powerful (not to mention a lot more stable) compared to Windows 95, it was also heavier and slower. IBM advertised Warp 3 as something that could run in 4 MB or RAM; that was no different from Microsoft stating 20 years later that Vista could run in a half GB RAM. Yes, the system loads, but you sadly can't do much with it save for looking at the shiny icons and enjoying the sound of the hard drive constantly spinning. Unfortunately back then RAM modules were so expensive that being forced to upgrade to 8 MB to have an usable system would make a difference, so although once upgraded the RAM OS/2 could become a huge step forward from windows, most people simply wouldn't spent that money.

4MB was ~$150 in 1994, less than cheapest 486 processor/cheapest CDROM drive/around 14.4 modem or 16bit sound card price etc. Whole 486 systems started around $1.2K, Pentium ones at $2K, 8MB was standard lowest Ram offered. $150 wasnt the end of the world.

OS/2 had comsistently higher hardware requirements than MS DOS and Windows. Mainly the memory usage was way higher. This was the price you had to pay for the better system design.

The MS system software of that era is a prime example of how worse is better for software products.

Sorry, but from my experience, this is not true. I did have several machines Running w95 and I did try to run OS/2 on them. It would boot but it would not run fast enough to work with it. W95, on the same hardware, worked quite well and responsive.

>Disk de-fragmenting, for example, was a Windows-only phenomenon.

How? Defragmenting is needed because random access on hdd is much, much slower than sequential. It's not something the os or fs can fix.

ext4 places files further apart on disk so fragmentation happens much less often.