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Picture Perfect and in Tune

Mono
Mono

I've taken the last month off from fiddling with new distros, and have instead just spent time enjoying the Ubuntu experience. It's amazing what you find time for when you're not fiddling with the command line to troubleshoot some obscure problem with your latest Linux testbed. One thing I've gotten around to is exploring the collection of Free Software available via the Ubuntu package repositories. I've fallen in love with two apps in particular: Muine is my new music player of choice, and F-Spot is without a doubt the neatest digital photo organizer I've ever used.

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It's all relative

Well if f-spot or muine are to be the all-encompassing programs that they set out to be then the code should be as efficient as possible. A music application is constantly running for many people. Add in possible compiling, while viewing images in f-spot, plus running the gnome desktop at the same time, while having firefox up and a gaim client, downloading via p2p or torrent, with a word document open in openoffice.org. Minus the compiling part(which is more of a personal habit)...this can be viewed as a typical user's current active desktop. It would be best to keep everything running as smoothly as possible. This is by no means a bash against mono, which is an excellent project. However, we still shouldnt forget that resource wise, the more efficient code can potentially be produced in C and the native libraries. The .NET libraries work great for businesses who need applications produced for immediate distribution among departments. It allows development teams to work more efficiently, at the sacrifice of raw computing speed and resource-usage. But this may not be in the best interest of a desktop environment which is a pretty standard and important application for many users, on varying types of machines, using varying types of resources.