Picasa for Linux

[Mike Hearn]

There's a lot of misunderstanding in this thread. A few points that might
help:

* It is possible to make Wine based "ports" fit in with the desktop much,
  much better than the current release of Picasa does. I have a copy of
  Picasa here that uses native GTK+ file pickers and a few natively
  designed (HIG compliant) windows. That is, actually using GTK+ not
  a theme bridge.

  The fact that Picasa for Linux today ships with a mostly Win32-style ui
  (it was tweaked a bit) is more to do with project/time
  management and economics than technical feasability. It's
  plausible that a future version will look different (but obviously 
  nothing I say here should be taken as gospel).

  Summary - technically a program brought to Linux using Wine can be given
  a GNOME/KDE native look and feel such that it is indistinguishable from
  a native app.

* Picasa does not use the systems copy of Wine and never will. It contains
  various Picasa specific changes that make no sense to send upstream, and
  the version that ships with Picasa is tested to work well with that app.

* Q&A is not Ubuntus problem, it's Google/CodeWeavers. I don't see why
  this was even brought up.

* Wines performance should match that of Windows XPs in the best case.
  It's unlikely to ever be significantly faster, though it could be. Parts
  are slower for various reasons, mostly when apps touch areas that
  haven't been significantly optimised. Occasionally there is a
  mismah overhead. That can be solved by modifying the application
  directly. This is similar to how GTK+ apps run slower on Windows, you
  might say. Also note that some apps, notably Firefox and OpenOffice, run
  faster on Wine than on Linux natively ;)

* Picasa and F-Spot isn't really a direct comparison as Picasa has some
  features F-Spot doesn't (yet) so one isn't a dropin replacement for
  another.

thanks -mike