Ubuntu :: Photography Management - Windows Better Than Natty ?

I'm a photographer and use Windows to run Adobe CS for most of my photography tasks, but sometimes I need to do editing in Ubuntu, the environment I use on a daily basis. However the image editing/manager programs I use just don't seem to work properly in Natty, so even for a quick RAW edit of one image, I end up pulling my hair out whilst in Ubuntu:

RAWTherapy
- Refuses to load folder contents after clicking on them
- Once I got as far as opening a RAW file, and then RT crashed. I've never been able to open up a RAW image since then

Digicam
- Managed to open folder contents and selected a few thumbnails but when trying to upload to flickr, it crashes

Flickr Uploader
- No option to create a new set (OK, maybe not a Unity issue but annoying all the same)

Any Upload Window
- when trying to upload an image to flickr, or to my blog, I cannot view my images in thumbnail view. So if I am searching for a specific image to upload I can only do so by image name. This is ridiculous. I have attempted to flag this up in a past thread and did not receive a response on this. Since this is the one action I do the most, I get constantly frustrated with having to open Nautilus, learn the image name, then locate it when in the upload window.
- When uploading to flickr the upload window increases to about 150% width of my screen, so I have to horizontally scroll to the 'upload' button after selecting my images

Thumbnail View
- Loading up image thumbnails in Nautilus is painfully slow. Windows is much faster.
- Increasing the thumbnail size to 200% is useless. It is not 200% of the original image size, but just 200% of the thumbnail. I can't view any larger than this 200% figure. Useless.
- When viewing thumbnails in Nautilus, it doesn't double up column view as I reduce the size of the thumbnails, they remain in just one column irrespective of the thumbnail size, culminating in loads of white space either side of the thumbnail

The Gimp
- I'm not going to slag The Gimp off because I understand it is an on-going project supported by just two developers and they have done a marvellous effort. It is very different from Photoshop but this is digressing from my main issues.

With these fundamental flaws in Unity/Ubuntu, I end up booting up Windows and working in my Adobe Creative Suite instead, which is a pain when I want to edit just a couple of images.

I was always led to believe that Linux was 'faster' than Windows but from my experience it is not the best environment for image editing. Nautilus is much slower than Windows Explorer and Digicam is a ridiculously complicated file manager on steroids. Adobe Bridge runs far fast in Windows 7 than Digicam does in Natty, which surprises me. I was recommended RawTherapy but this was by a Windows user who clearly doesn't experience the basic problems I have been running into whilst in Ubuntu.

Do any other photographers have these issues, or any others for that matter? More importantly, are there any work-arounds to these problems? I'd be interested to hear from serious photographers (editing and managing up to 1,000 images a month) who spend a lot of hours processing and managing their photographs. I don't know of any other serious photographers who use Linux: they all use Macs or Windows.