Yeah it would have been amazing to not have MS as the dominant desktop OS vendor in the world.
But Warp in particular was just sooooo heavy. I used it in the day, I even got a free cdrom somewhere. But it was just terribly sluggish. And I was a computer science student so I already had more resources than most. They really screwed that up so bad.
That's not my recollection of OS/2 3.0... It was snappy on contemporary hardware and 16MB memory.
But OS/2 was always sensitive to available RAM, and IBM liked to understate its memory requirements. (They pretended that OS/2 2.0 could run on 4MB because they had promised it years earlier. But it was really unusable on only four megs.) Maybe that was the issue?
I don't remember how much I had, but I think the "contemporary" is the issue. It really needed up to date hardware and most people didn't spend a lot on computers in those days so it would usually have been a year or some old.
And yeah I'm sure I didn't have a ton of ram, I don't remember how much though. I was only a poor student (but as a computer science student I already had a lot more than most people I knew).
But if someone just went home with a CDROM and installed it, it usually would not end well, this was part of the problem. I knew some enthusiasts that loved it but they did invest specifically to run it. That's just not great for an OS that still has to prove itself.
But Warp in particular was just sooooo heavy. I used it in the day, I even got a free cdrom somewhere. But it was just terribly sluggish. And I was a computer science student so I already had more resources than most. They really screwed that up so bad.
They should have called it OS/2 Wait