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New Google Apps For Linux Coming
techoon writes "The goal of the Google Linux Client Team is to develop Linux desktop applications, such as the official Linux versions of Google Earth and Google Picasa. This team made an interesting splash during a presentation at the first-ever Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which they had kindly hosted at their Mountain View campus. The Google presenters claimed some 'significant accomplishments' and other new Google desktop applications coming out this year for the Linux platform."
Why not all? (And why no hyphen either?)
This misses the point of Wine. Wine is for running applications that CANNOT be ported, e.g. commercial software like MS Office. Applications that can be ported, should. Otherwise, they pack their own version of Wine, and it can conflict with a version of Wine a user already has installed.
A native Linux version of Picasa doesn't seem preposterous to me. Google's done it with Google Earth.
Using hacks like Wine (a great hack, but still a hack) to run applications on Linux makes it less appealing to me than running native software.
My grandmother used anecdotal evidence all the time, and she lived to be 120 years old.
Part of the problem is, native for which Linux? There are multiple OSes based on the Linux kernel, and they vary wildly, as to which hardware they run on and what underlying libraries and APIs they incorporate.
If Google wants to do it right, they need to release a cross-platform source tarball, and nothing less. A binary glob that only runs in version xx.xx of 'distro' xyzzy won't cut it.
Part of why I say this is that I run NetBSD, and said source tarball would be rolled into pkgsrc quickly, too. A binary blob that I have to run under Linux emulation wouldn't be nearly as nice.
Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.
Yes, the work done on IExplore for Picasa benefitted all apps that use embedded browsers. Wine's quality is far higher now than it was back when Corel tried it with Word Perfect; it's reasonable to expect a Wine app to run smoothly and without crashes these days -- if, that is, the vendor is willing to do a little QA and get a few Wine bugs fixed, like Google was. More companies should use Wine to port their apps to Linux, at least to get a toe in the water. If sales take off, they can dive in and do the native port.
So google might build a special distribution for it's data centre but it's desktops would be a default popular install i.e. Ubuntu as well as a few other desktops for a depth of knowledge and trialling.
Google is first and foremost a marketing company, a company that advertises itself as one of it's main priorities, any public action it's takes will be adjusted to promote a cool, friendly, feel good, image, of course anything done in private (subject to employee leaks) will be purely profit based, all rather smarmy. There is no marketing value in google creating it's own Linux desktop (if it creates a privacy invasive version to generate profits it would simply get caught and suffer the consequences), whilst there is marketing value in creating applications to run properly on Linux, google doesn't want invest the money(it still wants the free marketing of course), and definitely not contribute to open source versions, especially when the applications have a distinct element of prying into the users private life for 'marketing' purposes.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
In fact, Google should spearhead this sort of thing by supporting (if only in the form of patches) cross-platform toolkits like Python, GTK, etc. Google's web services (search, docs&spreadsheets, etc.) are powerful in part because they are cross-platform; Google applications should be the same. To do so is in Google's self-interest.