I ran NT4 on my laptop in the late 90s and remember it was somewhat unusual. A little clunky, my memory is some common things like changing screen resolution required a reboot, but it was more reliable and responsive overall. Most people stuck with the 95/98/Me progression due to cost (2000 wanted more memory than Me and partially for that reason Me was default preload on most PCs).
I ran NT4 on my Thinkpad briefly around 98 or 99... it sucked. Power management didn't work at all. USB didn't work at all. The video driver was awful. The built-in ethernet didn't work; you had to use a PCMCIA card to get networking at all.
Essentially, it turned the laptop into an under-powered desktop with a built-in UPS and slow video.
These things were generally better by the time 2000 came around... but NT4 was never any good on my laptop. (And at the bank where I worked when I graduated in 1999, it was terrible on those as well. The senior managers' laptops were the only systems in the bank allowed to use 98.)
NT 4 was rubbish for laptops. But it was a state-of-the-art OS for desktops in 1996.
Laptops were not so crucial then. Few people used a laptop as their primary computer; they were an adjunct to a _real_ computer, suitable for emergency working on the move, but with poor CPU, slow disks, poor graphics, etc.
The default computer for business until ½ decade or so into the 21st century was a desktop PC, and for them, from 1993 onwards, NT was unrivalled.
And I speak as someone who spent their own money on OS/2 2.0. I've been working in the industry since the 1980s, which means I never spent my own cash on software. (I'm not a gamer.) I've been using FOSS for 25+ years now, but OS/2 2.0 was worth the money.
> NT 4 was rubbish for laptops. But it was a state-of-the-art OS for desktops in 1996.
That matches my recollection. I was working in a shop that used NT 4 on 15000+ desktops. (I do recall SP3 or SP4 causing a ton of drama on those.) We were never able to get it to run acceptably on a laptop.
I never used OS/2 2.0 in anger. I did run Warp 4 on a few systems and recall preferring it over NT 4. It was also only suitable for desktops, though.
