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New OS/2 Warp Operating System 'ArcaOS' 5.0 Released (arcanoae.com)
The long-awaited modern OS/2 distribution from Arca Noae was released Monday. martiniturbide writes: ArcaOS 5.0 is an OEM distribution of IBM's discontinued OS/2 Warp operating system. ArcaOS offers a new set of drivers for ACPI, network, USB, video and mouse to run OS/2 in newer hardware. It also includes a new OS installer and open source software like Samba, Libc libraries, SDL, Qt, Firefox and OpenOffice... It's available in two editions, Personal ($129 with an introductory price of $99 for the first 90 days [and six months of support and maintenance updates]) and Commercial ($239 with one year of support and maintenance).
The OS/2 community has been called upon to report supported hardware, open source any OS/2 software, make public as much OS/2 documentation as possible and post the important platform links. OS2World insists that open source has helped OS/2 in the past years and it is time to look under the hood to try to clone internal components like Control Program, Presentation Manager, SOM and Workplace Shell.
By Tuesday Arca Noae was reporting "excessive traffic on the server which is impacting our ordering and delivery process," though the actual downloads of the OS were unaffected, the server load issues were soon mitigated, and they thanked OS/2 enthusiasts for a "truly overwhelming response."
The OS/2 community has been called upon to report supported hardware, open source any OS/2 software, make public as much OS/2 documentation as possible and post the important platform links. OS2World insists that open source has helped OS/2 in the past years and it is time to look under the hood to try to clone internal components like Control Program, Presentation Manager, SOM and Workplace Shell.
By Tuesday Arca Noae was reporting "excessive traffic on the server which is impacting our ordering and delivery process," though the actual downloads of the OS were unaffected, the server load issues were soon mitigated, and they thanked OS/2 enthusiasts for a "truly overwhelming response."
While I can't speak of the OS/2 "internals" as I've never developed for the platform, as someone who still administrates OS/2 systems to this day, my end-user experiences are far from what you describe.
At the manufacturing plant I work for, we have numerous pick-and-place machines and through-hole insertion machines that are driven by OS/2 embedded systems.
The front end software was also made for OS/2 on a desktop, which in our case lives in VirtualBox instances on the engineers workstations.
While these systems are not on our standard client computer vlan, and in effect can only see each other in what is basically the OS/2 vlan, the systems themselves run flawlessly and with pretty insane uptimes.
The machine controllers have never actually been "rebooted", and in the last decade only powered off and on twice (Once due to a 12+ hour power-loss, and once for relocating the machines themselves)
That last power cycle was back in 2011, and they have been running for 6 years non-stop without problems.
The front-end systems have also never once needed rebooted to fix any stability issues or problems, although these systems don't run continuously.
That however is mostly due to the fact the virtualbox virtualization hosts are Windows desktops that do have to reboot for updates and stability issues. Thus the VMs are only ran as needed.
None of the bare metal involved are IBM PS/2 based systems, or IBM systems in anyway beyond being x86 backwards compatible Pentium era embedded machines.
As an OS/2 developer, you are likely in a very small minority that is already within a very small minority.
I'm not saying you are incorrect or anything, but within the small group of existing "end users" I gather you won't find many people at all that share your view of OS/2.