How to use a digital camera with Linux

DigiKam. That's it.

I used to recommend installing a whole suite of software to fill various needs, but DigiKam does it all in one place, and it does it well:

• Download images from your camera. (You have to add your camera to its list the first time, so it will recognize it. But it's really, really easy to do that. And after that, all you have to do is plug in your camera then right-click on the desktop icon.)
• View thumbnails
• View full-screen images
• Basic image editing (including brightness/contrast, color/saturation, red-eye reduction, rotate, crop, resize, sharpen, blur -- I guess that's more than basic!)

And it's a breeze to install: sudo apt-get install digikam

The only downside: only limited support for raw photos.  But you can still view the thumbnail, and you can still choose another app to open it with (there's still Gimp!).

Once again, Linux software is better than its Windows counterparts in terms of functionality, useability, and ease to install; and it's free.