i heard everything is easy and intuitive in the “apple” world

that might be true in case all your it-gadgets are decorated by an apple. But if a iPhone is the only device that you own from this vendor then you will struggle with the simplest things like…

i just want to copy my photos, live-photos and videos from my iPhone to my linux desktop

But this story tends to get long. All i tried did not please me in the end, after hours of tries from iCloud, iTunes software, struggling with interrupting downloads via USB cable i finally found a good (but expensive) way to just download my photos.

the (expensive) solution is: “Simple Transfer Pro”

Simple Transfer Pro - App Store

after spending some bucks, you get a nice app that when started let’s you connect with your linux-browser to the ip address of your phone.
The Browser-UI of the app categorizes your photos and videos like “recent”, “selfies”, “videos” and so on. If you purchased the pro-version you can select all your images at once.
The download dialog gives you important import settings for your photos, live-photos and videos. With recent iPhone’s images and videos will be stored with an incompatible file format (incompatible for linux or windows devices). The download-options let you choose to convert that media on the fly to widely supported media codecs.
For example live-photos can be saved as photo and additionally as a short video which is very nice.