Picasa for Linux

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Mon, May 29, 2006 at 05:10:42PM +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Mon, May 29, 2006 at 05:10:38PM +0200, Marco Cabizza wrote:
> 
> > We're not talking about GTK or QT. We are talking about a total lack of
> > performance.
> 
> Why would Wine be any slower than GTK or QT? It's an implementation of 
> an API.

Regardless of whether or not it /should/ be, empirical experience says
it /is/.

Also, "It's an implementation of an API" is a strong oversimplification,
regardless of what winehq might say. More accurate would be to include
the program loader and (optional) emulated Windows environment
subsystems in a description of it.

But even thinking of it as an API, recall that quite a bit of the
internal functionality that API presents is available on Windows as part
of an operating system, whereas on Linux (and other systems) that
functionality must be emulated in userland with what priveleges are
available to it in that space, on /top/ of an operating system. Surely
that's bound to result in some efficiency disadvantages? In addition to
the fact that Wine has been around a lot shorter than Windows (in its
various iterations), and has had less time for optimization than for its
ongoing feature-matching scramble?

Also, my experience with (free) wine has been quite poor unless you
install non-free Windows-native DLLs on top of it. However, this doesn't
apply to cases where a company is taking responsibility to use wine to
port their Windows app (such as what this thread has been discussing).

Nothing in this post should be construed to mean that I dislike wine,
or even the idea of supporting it in Ubuntu (though I am of course
against supporting non-free Windows products in "officially supported"
repositories). I use wine myself, and am extatic whenever I don't have
to go to Windows to run such-and-such (usually a game). I'm just trying
to point out that it's not really /merely/ an API, and even if it were,
it can still be slower than GTK or QT.

Perhaps this post also wasn't the ideal introduction for me to this
list, but... *shrug*... Hello, all. :) I'm a new and very happy Ubuntu
user.

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer...
http://micah.cowan.name/