Of course, around that time you could also run an Irix desktop, complete with Photoshop and SoftPC and even (later on) IE, but that was sadly beyond the reach of most consumers.
UNIX variants, OS/2, and the BSDs were the options at the time for decent networking...Mac OS wasn't in the running.
There was even good cross-subnet capabilities in the form of AppleTalk "zones", although you had to have routers which could speak AppleTalk in order for it to work. But when it did work, man was it nice! Far ahead of Windows at the time, and still superior in many ways when it came to ease of use vs. the zeroconf stuff of today.
IIRC, almost everything Windows 3.11 had out of the box was already present on Macs for ages. Shared printers, p2p file servers, instant messaging (that was an add-on) and more. And better - it all just worked.
I remember that, at the time, the e-mail client/server that came with 3.11 was nice and I don't remember anything like that on Macs, but, with that exception, System 7 was orders of magnitude better than 3.11.
* "Standard mode" was dropped, so 3.11 required a 386 or above * Significant networking improvements (hence the "for workgroups" in the name) including IIRC built-in TCP/IP support (prior to that most people used Trumpet Windsock) * I/O subsystem improvements too
I've heard it said that WfW3.11 was essentially a huge gamma-test for the network and I/O subsystems intended for what became Windows 95.
Also, WfW did not initially ship with built in winsock implementation, WfW did ship all the networking apparatuses other than that, just needing a drop-in winsock.
I never had cause to use SoftPC.