While developing and testing the BigIcons, I took advantage of the systems mutitasking environment. I had XPager set up for 5 desktops or rooms or whatever you want to call them. I had FM/2 opened in the first, the second desktop ready to use another instance of FM/2 or PMView when needed, PMView in the third, Small (a text editor I purchased over 20 years ago in the fourth, with the 5th used to open folders and properties to get and check info, along with restarting the desktop.
I discovered you can only restart the desktop approximately 10 times before XPager disappears and the system has to be rebooted. I can't imagine trying to do what I did under Windows. What I did in 2 weeks, it would have be months under Windows. As it was, I worked around 10 hours or more each day to get it to the presently level. The wife wasn't happy.
You posted this on Nov 30, 2023 and it is currently March 1st, 2026.
I just retired and I just purchase Arca Noae OS/2 though I'm waiting on some dual layer DVD-R disks (I ordered them and they will be arriving in about 5 days) in order to install it on a laptop.
My experience with OS/2 was from when the beta for OS/2 2.0 was first being demo'd by IBM in the fall of 1991 and IT CHANGED MY LIFE! And that is an understatement.
Before OS/2 2.0 beta I was running four computers on my desks. I had four computers and four desks with one chair and would spin from one to the next because I wore MANY hats writing things in WordPerfect (and printing or emailing them), creating spreadsheets in Lotus 1-2-3, created and ran batch files which copied files from our central location to Home Loan Centers and from the HLCs back to our central location, and I created digital versions of all our forms, and I was a programmer keeping programs up to date or bug fixing and that was just SOME of the things that I did. And if I had room and more hands I would could have used mored computers.
But when I went and saw what OS/2 2.0 beta could do I was blown out of the water. They gave us a disk (and license) to take to work with us and try it out. I was able to set up one computer with 4 MB of RAM and I installed all of the programs including the batch files and I was able to do EVERYTHING on that OS/2 computer and I didn't have to switch to another computer and never had to worry about anything crashing because OS/2 was THAT stable.
I got rid of all my other computer and just used that one OS/2 2.0 computer after that and bought licenses for more computers. And anytime I had a user that was having problems with Windows or DOS programs on a continuing basis, I would buy another OS/2 license and install it on their computer and tell them it was a special version of Windows so they wouldn't realize it wasn't Windows which would have them throw a fit. But all their problems went away when they were using OS/2 instead of Windows!
I was maybe three times more productive because of OS/2 than I was with FOUR DOS and Win 3.1 computers because I didn't have to worry about which computer my program or files were on since they were all on the same computer. And that computer never had to be rebooted unless I installed an update to OS/2 that updated the main part of OS/2.
I literally cried when IBM said they weren't going to keep updating OS/2 anymore or supporting it past some unknown date. Nobody at the time knew that they would license OS/2 to third party companies to keep drivers up to date so that companies could keep running OS/2 programs so they didn't have to rewrite the programs which would have caused a LOT of them to tell IBM good-bye if they had to do that. Which is why IBM wanted OS/2 to keep running on newer computers even if they weren't going officially keep updating it anymore.
OS/2 (and BeOS) are/were the only OSs that I LOVED using and OS/2 could do EVERYTHING that I needed to do and it truly was a better DOS than DOS and a better Windows than Windows (16 bit only) and Describe and other native OS/2 were great while they lasted. Unfortunately Describe went away along with most of the 3rd party shrink-wrap software and the only apps that continued to be around were those that people supported in house. The bank I worked for didn't use OS/2 other than what I used it for so the writing was on the wall for me using OS/2 as they were switching everything to Windows and I ended moving up to another organization that was even more anti anything other than Microsoft than the bank became.