Which Linux OS are you using and what is your photography software of choice?

I use Debian, usually stable, for many years.

I use rawtherapee, hugin, gimp, graphicsmagick, gmic command line and plugin for gimp, exiftool, and korn shell scripts that I wrote. I compiled from source a newer version of libraw than the one that comes with Debian stable and use dcraw_emu.

I also use Debian on my web server.

I do not use flatpacks or containers because I am not certain that I can secure them.

In the past, I used qemu to run a Windows virtual machine so that I could run the Canon DPP program, but that is the only Windows program I ran and I think that virtual machine is better than dual boot. Now I run Canon DPP on an iMac and use XQuartz to display the programs running on my Debian desktop. I have no desire to run commercial software other than what was included with macOS. I also have gimp on my iMac, but prefer to run it on the Debian machine. I have compiled gmic, graphicsmagick, and libraw dcraw_emu on my iMac and use them occassionally. I use exiftool on both Debian and macOS. I use korn shell as my login shell on both Debian and macOS because I have been using it as a login shell since 1987.

So far, I do not like AI noise reduction as a matter of personal preference.

I've moved to mostly flatpaks and appimages as well. It keeps the system a little cleaner as the dependencies are bundled in, not to mention the sandboxing benefits.

Isn't Ubuntu from the start a heavily modified version of Gnome?

Fedora uses Gnome and it's pure stock Gnome. It is very barebones. No desktop icon support. Desktop is only the top bar. Pressing the "windows key" shows a search bar, your workspaces, and a dock with your pinned applications. Double pressing the "windows key" goes into your full applications list with the search bar and workspaces shown at the top. By default stock Gnome is very keyboard shortcut driven.

Ubuntu is a distro of linux that currently uses Gnome as its desktop. At one time Ubuntu has its own desktop called Unity but they seem to have abandoned that. The Gnome desktop you describe sounds very much like the default Gnome desktop included with Ubuntu. I modified Gnome to look like Windows using a couple of add on tools.

With Linux you are not actually limited to the desktop that ships with your distro as default. I can swap out my desktop for the Kubuntu or Xbuntu desktops just by selecting them from a drop down at boot time. Linux seems happy to run under any desktop you choose to install. Then you can modify the hell out of them to suit how you want things to look. It's not like those O/S that decide for you what your desktop should look like then graciously let you change the colours.

Here's what my desktop looks like if I click the default Gnome "waffle" applications icon instead of my fake windows start button. Pretty stock Gnome, I think, looks like a tablet desktop. Not a fan of touch screen GUI for desktops.

:

EDIT: If you look in the bottom left corner of the dock/taskbar, you'll see the waffle icon for stock Gnome and next to it an icon that fakes the windows start button menus (I have mine styled more like old school win95 text menus because I prefer the clean look to the modern windows mega menus).

I think Gnome was designed by somebody out to destroy Linux.

With no customization, Linux Mint in all 3 iterations (Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce) looks and behaves a lot like Windows.

You can move _[]X to the left side if you want it to behave more like MacOS, but there's no in-box way to make 🔴🟡🟢.

KDE is great but I don't like Konsole because it changes size (lines, columns) when font is enlarged or reduced.

I think with most Linux desktops there are tools that can restyle things to look almost exactly like windows (depending on which version you want to emulate). I've used KDE and Xfce and Unity and old style Gnome 2. In fact at one point I had things set up so I could easily swap between them when I got bored. Linux doesn't seem to mind having multiple desktops installed. For a long while after swapping from Xfce to Gnome, the mouse graphic still used to pop up when I was doing certain things. It got kind of confused as to what desktop it was!

I do also dislike how snaps pollute the list of mounted block devices. While I do have some snaps on my work Linux machines, I'm quite happy using appimages for the few cases I don't feel like building software myself such as ART on my personal Linux environment.

After trying various distros in the world of Red Hat, Slackware, Mandrake and SUSE I settled with Debian in around 2000 and just stayed there. I have played with Ubuntu in various flavours but the way Canonical are going now is just not on. Snaps and Flatpaks are a space hogging dog's dinner and I just don't trust them. OK I do have a couple of Appimages for stuff that is otherwise just not available but that's the exception.

Recently I switched over to MX - bit of a love hate relationship in the past but it is now doing the job nicely. Good blend of stable, with backports and repackaged upstream stuff easly available.

I swapped over to XFCE when Gnome 2 came to an end (actually I think before then because it was when XFCE still had the CDE drawers in the bottom panel......)

Enjoy using Trinity (KDE3.5 as continued by the Trinity Desktop project) usually the Q4OS version. Been using that since 2015 I think it must be.

Really cannot get into KDE Plasma - it just seems so 'brittle'.

TBH the early photo editing tools for linux were pretty dire but things change. These days it is mostly Darktable and Lightzone. FastStone under WINE is still very useful for a lot of quick edits, and even gThumb is getting there slowly.

GIMP if I must but never been a great fan.

JASC Paintshop Pro 9.1 under WINE is good for some tasks that I might have tried to use GIMP for.......

I still run Picassa - again under WINE - as some of its quick edit/styles are very useful with old slides after scanning.

For a lot of jobs xnViewMP is really useful - especially batch jobs of renaming, resizing etc. Also it's a very quick RAW viewer.

For default picture viewing geeqie is really nice.

Linux Mint for me with Faststone viewer running under WINE all works fine

Thanks RR and Vaughanb. I will definitely install WINE on Linux Mint because I like FastStone, although Geeqie is OK.

wine.htmlvalidator.com/install-wine-on-linux-mint-21.html

As I have mentioned elsewhere, if you are running FastStone under WINE you'll find that the thumbnail view of a folder will only show a handful of what is actually there. You'll need to switch to small icon or detailed to see all of them.
I have no experience of WINE+FS under Cinnamon. It is OK in XFCE, but if you use MATE then editing ( especially in full screen) can cause trouble especially if you use keyboard shortcuts. The editing screens a smaller than normal and cannot be resized. I think this is an issue with the MATE compositor but cannot be sure.

I have Xubuntu (I like xfce low resources/tweakability) install on a hard drive BUT I am currently using FossaPup64 from a flash drive as it's faster since it loads into RAM.

I'm using the basics I guess : GIMP, PhotoFiltre, DarkTable, RawTherapee. I tried digiKam but it always crashes with either distro.

I use Xubuntu as a virtual operating system on Mac Book Pro Retina 15' laptop as my main photo system.
Mac OS is used for Adobe Photoshop CS6, Adobe Bridge and ACR and for storage of current images. The images are also accessible from the Xubuntu system.
Xubuntu is used for everything else : dcraw , libraw , exiftool , mtfmapper , netpbm, my own programs, house holding managing folder structure, image ingesting, backups.

OS-Mint 20.3-cinnamon ---- Graphics--GIMP, ART(offshoot of raw therapee) ,zerene stacker , xn view