Google officially releases Picasa for Linux

I am tempted to scream “about time”, but I will refrain. Instead, I will stand back and be impressed with the fact that it’s finally here!

Google has officially released an alpha version of the popular Picasa image management application for the Linux platform. Rather than porting the application so that it can run natively on Linux, Google decided to leverage Wine, an open source implementation of the Windows API that enables Windows applications to be deployed and run on Linux systems. The Linux version of Picasa includes integrated components of CodeWeaver’s specially augmented Wine build, so users do not have to install or configure Wine independently before installing Picasa.

Although it is nice to see Google making their tools available for the Linux platform, a Wine-based Picasa probably won’t impress very many Linux users. Wine isn’t known for being stable, and applications that run through Wine tend to integrate poorly with the rest of the system. Additionally, there are many well-designed native image management applications for Linux that are popular and easy to use. Native Linux applications like F-Spot, Digikam, GThumb, and Gwenview all provide better performance than Picasa on the Linux platform, and varying levels of roughly comparable functionality. As nice as Picasa may be, I doubt that it will be as graceful, intuitive, or effective as the much-anticipated, open source lowfat document viewing framework…. Source: Ars Technica

[tags]google,linux,picasa,gwenview[/tags]