> Also, OS/2 had a chicken-and-egg problem. Its best selling point was its compatibility with MS-DOS and Windows applications. However, this meant few developer

> Also, OS/2 had a chicken-and-egg problem. Its best selling point was its compatibility with MS-DOS and Windows applications. However, this meant few developers took the time to write OS/2-native apps. So, why run OS/2 at all? I don't think this is comparable to the Win32 vs. (GNU/)Linux situation. There do exist lots of people who did write Linux-native applications in the past, but the APIs of many userland libraries of the GNU/Linux ecosystem tend not to be stable for a very long time, so these applications simply did not work anymore at some point in time. Because of the technical complications that shipping GUI applications for GNU/Linux involves, a lot of companies concluded that developing and shipping applications for GNU/Linux is not worth it.