Just spend a half hour messing with Picasa, and it’s mostly frustrating. Things I’ve noticed:

• The slideshow functionality does not work at all. It completely scrambles the screen, and doesn’t accept ESC or any other keystroke to get out of it. I had to drop to console and kill the Picasa process to recover.
• The import has hung twice on me, requiring me to kill -9 the process - it wouldn’t respond to a normal kill.
• It consumes GOBS of memory. When importing a folder with about 300 pictures in it, it gobbled 1.2GB of virtual memory. Considering this box only has 512MB RAM, I think that’s … bad.

So, I think I’m going to call this a failed experiment, from where I sit. I’d file bugs, but I think it’s a lost cause - I’ll just stick with f-spot. Or if push comes to shove, I’ll use iPhoto on my Mac.