Now, how often have I read such comments? Many times and they become more and more, no surprise...

Google provides only MS-Windows compiled products for the Linux desktop, which must be run via wine. GoogleEarth version 4.x worked fine this way but with any newer version GE has become more crash happy. I'm afraid that the next GE version 8 will only run on maybe 10% of all hardware, which is pretty appalling but Google does not care about the Linux users. I'm at the point to suggest dumping all Google products like GE, Picasa, etc. in particular on 64bit where Google provides only 32bit MS-Windows versions...

These products just pull in lots of Windows libraries, and do not even work reliably. There are many alternatives for Picasa, or GE, i.e. one can use GoogleMaps in any browser.