...Wine Wrapper?

just downloaded on ubuntu and started using last night.
i get a strong Wine Wrapper feeling.
is that all the effort that was put into this? (basically recompiling a windows program into a Layer that acts as a Linux app)

Wine is basically a translation layer, translating calls to Windows API into Linux-native calls. And that's pretty much it in a nutshell.

What gives you this feeling? Performance? Look&Feel of the UI?

Are you talking about GLUT?

/me is confused

first off, it has the default Windows XP cursor. thats a big one.
and the colour schemes never match my default settings in ubuntu (for a few different things. they do transition when i change things in VISTA)
also, Usually linux apps are faster then windows apps. only games running id technology 2, 3, and 4 get a significant boost when using wine. everything else is the same or a tad slower.

I just dont get why people dont do native ports for BIG things like second life.

The linux SL client is compiled natively in a linux environment.. It might not look any different because it uses all the same art and GUI, but it has nothing to do with WINE. I have my own compiled client running in Ubuntu, and it IS way faster than my windows client (note: I have an nvidia card).

Now that you mention it. I have to admit I never noticed that. I wonder why the cursors are compiled into the binary. That would only make sense if icons with special (SL specific) meaning were being used, which isn't the case.
color scheme of the SL window border (in windowed mode) or color scheme of the 'windows' (a.k.a. floaters) within SL? If the first doesn't match your color scheme, your GTK+ is broken, I'd say. If the second does adapt to anything but SL's own skinning feature, something else is definitely weird, because it was designed to look the same on all platforms (which isn't untypical for games and game-like applications).

I think it's good, SL has the same UI/look&feel on all platforms. I often fail at finding menu entries in the Windows versions of Firefox because some of them are in different menus than in the linux version. (Like Edit > Preferences vs. Extras > Preferences) Though I can understand some people value consistency between different applications within the same OS higher than consistency within the same application across different platforms.

About the speed: Some linux drivers implement less features than their windows counterparts for the same graphic cards. SL auto detects some of them and disables usage of features which aren't available. This might result speedup or slowdown, depending on if the disabled feature accelerates processing or just adds eye candy by putting more load on the card. Some drivers might even offer features the hardware doesn't, by providing software implementations of them. Efficiency of these software implementations might of course vary between linux and windows drivers. (Correct me, anyone, in case I'm telling total bullshit. This is mere smattering than knowledge from my side.)

I think you're pretty much spot on the mark. Even on the same platform, feature and efficiency differences between different driver versions.

Another key difference between graphics drivers compiled for Windows vs. Linux is that Windows drivers are usually optimized for DirectX performance, and OpenGL capability is simply thrown in for compatibility. With Linux, though, there IS no DirectX, so all the attention is given to optimizing and tuning its OpenGL performance.

Since the SL viewer is an OpenGL application on both Windows and Linux, it's no surprise that its performance on Linux blows away its Windows counterpart.

Of course, the fact that Linux has better memory management and far lower system overhead than Windows probably has a lot to do with it as well