> runs Windows better than Windows

It already does. When Elden Ring released, it suffered from terrible performance problems, which were worked around in VKD3D (DX12 for Wine) in the first week of release.

I've heard people complaining about Elden Ring performance on Windows for months afterwards.

OS/2 also did, until it did not.

The point is the historical lesson of building castles on other companies kingdoms, not the technical achievement.

I think if IBM had simply put in the engineering to allow Windows 95 to run as the Win-OS/2 layer, OS/2 may have survived a lot longer.

I've done a fair amount of research into this and I think it was technically within reach. IBM's marketing "a better DOS than DOS, a better Windows than Windows" was true until Windows 95 came out, and it would have continued to be true if they had simply offered Win95-OS/2. Not being able to run the latest Windows (Win32) software meant that OS/2 was no longer a better Windows than Windows, it was just a different and increasingly dated-looking Windows.

IBM was too self-absorbed to do this. They were going to ditch both Microsoft and Intel and make PowerPC machines running OS/2. That didn't work out too well.

Imagine a world where OS/2 Warp 3 saw a BBS-distributed or Internet-distributed update to support Win95-OS/2 released within a week of Windows 95 going to retail. It was entirely possible in September of 1995 to do this, Warp Connect adding Internet support was done this way. The "Chicago" betas were widely available so this could have easily been co-developed.

The real lesson here is that building a better runtime actually can work, if you commit to maintaining feature parity. OS/2 faltered because IBM stopped developing the features their customers wanted, like the ability to run standard Win32 software, and instead developed the features IBM wanted, like the ability to run on a different CPU architecture.

But Linux offers more value beyond running games written for Windows so the analogy doesn't hold.

OS/2 did offer a lot of value beyond just running Windows software. The WPS (Workplace Shell) is to this day one of the better desktop UIs. It brought a lot of the classic Macintosh feel to the PC world and improved upon it. Where Windows only vaguely looked like a Macintosh, OS/2 had things like a spatial filer so it felt a lot more like a Macintosh on steroids. It had neat ideas like "template files" and a bunch of other stuff I can't even remember.

On the non-GUI front it had a better command processor, CMD.EXE, which is a precursor to the Windows NT one. It had an actually decent scripting language (REXX). It had a better filesystem (HPFS).

It was also incredibly good at running DOS games of the era, while comfortably multitasking in the background, including serial port and network usage. You could be downloading something while fragging some demons in Doom. You could also pause the game at any time and switch back to the desktop, then go back and resume.

The thing that was different between OS/2 and Linux + WINE is the engineering approach. IBM had a license to use actual DOS and Windows code, at least until they cancelled the JDA (Joint Development Agreement) contract with Microsoft in 1990. Even after they cancelled, they still had rights to everything from before, which included Windows 3.0.

In order to avoid having to pay Microsoft a royalty on the Windows portions of OS/2, which they had to pass along in the retail price, they even released a variant of OS/2 version 2.1 called "OS/2 for Windows" which took your existing Windows 3.x, the one that you almost certainly already paid for as part of your computer, and binary patched it to work under OS/2. There was some grousing when Windows 3.11 came out and broke it, but IBM issued a patch.

So, in essence, they were able to market OS/2 less like a replacement OS, and more like a utility program you added on to your existing system to make it behave better. Kind of like hey, you just dropped $2000-$3000 or more on a new system, what'a another $129 to make it really sing.

And because it leveraged the fact that you already paid for Windows when you bought the computer, compatibility was top-notch: it was actually running real Windows.

In my opinion as a user at the time, what killed it was the move to Win32 software which OS/2 couldn't run but Windows 95 could. Once computers started regularly coming with enough RAM to run Windows NT 4, the nice things about OS/2 just weren't enough to justify the inability to run basically every new software package.

OS/2 was more stable than Windows and it had threaded application support -so the analogy does hold, IMO.