Novell bashing, as opposed to technical and business practice critique, is still quite rare here. It's rare for a reason. Nevertheless, there are some issues which make Novell's SUSE inferior to some of its sibling competitors. Here, for example, is a new complaint about YaST.

Several of the items in the Control Center's Peripherals section also appear in YAST's Hardware section, and there's more duplication between Control Center's Internet & Network and YAST'S Network Services section. Further, if you've got access to openSUSE, open up your YAST tool and go to the software section. Only, do it as if you were a total newcomer to both openSUSE and Linux in general - how confused do you think you would be by the TEN softare configuration tools included? There are THREE tools - count them - just for handling online updates!

YaST was a decent tool in the days of KDE, but with Novell's focus shift to GNOME, there tends to be less consistency.

In other news, it appears as though Novell continues to lose business, which surely translates into degradation of revenue.

Washington and Lee University experienced a rapid surge in storage during a year-long migration from Novell NetWare to Microsoft Windows.

It makes another lost customer -- in fact a customer that was large. It could be worse though. The deal could be lost to Novell 'rivals', unlike Microsoft, which is now its partner in an "alliance". Novell, which as the above indicates loses business to Microsoft, actually helps Microsoft get business and that includes pimping Windows Vista. It must be love. But it flows in a single direction. ⬆

Image from Wikimedia