Google released Picasa for Linux. At first glance, I would say “thats awesome google”, however…

Instead of porting to Linux, they simply made the win32 version more friendly with WINE by contracting codeweavers to help. You can see the quite hefty list of patches here: http://code.google.com/wine.html. Wine adds an extra 13mb on to the download. Mozilla adds and extra ~20MB (since they have to package a Win32 version of Gecko that runs under wine). Before its over you wasted around 50MB in just emulating Windows to make the thing work. Yeesh.

Thanks Google for thinkng of the Linux crowd. Its just that Wine is best served for running Windows applications on Linux when you have too rather and not the best choice when then targeting targetting Linux. I think there are easier and cleaner ways of doing this then using Wine. Picasa is cute, but its not that special of an application. It doesn’t have that many moving parts really. How about instead of trying to use Wine and hack together a release that direction, try expanding Mozilla’s XUL to be the new UI for Picasa maybe. I’m sure that if you of spent an equal ammount of time working on a more conventional method using a better esstablished cross platform UI toolkit and released what you had and even if wasn’t as powerful, the Linux crowd would latch on to it more.

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