Well, Ubuntu has failed me much like Pop!OS22.04 did. Turned out there were many more issues other than just the ones I was focused on. Made my head spin. Seemed the whole "Snaps" issues didn't help either.
However it also allowed for me to see firsthand what made Photoshop unusable after installing it. What was the difference between Pop and Ubuntu? Pop allows you to download an .iso file dedicated to those of us using Nvidia drivers. Ubuntu installs with the open source Xorg driver. Photoshop 5.5 and Wine 8.0.2 have no immediate issues with this video driver. But when I tried using either Nvidia's 470 or 525 proprietary drivers, they broke Photoshop with the same error message.
Of course I should reiterate that what I am attempting technologically speaking, is somewhere between impossible and pointless. Seriously, does anyone in the industry care about whether someone can operate a particular 32-bit program that is 25 years old? LOL...uh...no, not really.
The logic of why I'm having so much trouble with these two Ubuntu/Debian-based systems is obvious. But what makes it all one big mystery is the fact that on the OS I'm on right now, runs Photoshop 5.5 thru Wine 8.0.2 flawlessly, and with an updated Nvidia 525 driver. What is Linux Mint doing that the others are not?
At the moment I'm actually thinking about reinstalling Pop!OS22.04 again, but with one major change. To install it with the open source video driver rather than a proprietary Nvidia driver. Of course it amounts to cutting the video acceleration capability in half, but whatever it takes to be able to run Photoshop 5.5 uneventfully. Other than that, I figure the main thing not to do is to arbitrarily change icons that are not "theme-based". That seemed to crash Pop with unrecoverable system errors every time. Weird too that it involved not any and every icons, but only those "favorites" that were default icons to the dock when the OS was initially installed.
For the most part, either of these two operating systems seem acceptable provided you run them out-of-the-box, with only minor alterations. Though both
seem potentially capable of rich customization through Gnome Shell Extensions. Which is really the one thing I'd like to explore more in depth. Provided of course I get Photoshop running and don't keep encountering more unforeseen problems. And while Pop! uses a swap partition, Ubuntu does not. Making it clear that neither are an issue as far as Wine and Photoshop go.
I may ultimately give up the idea of running Wine or Photoshop if I can get everything else running acceptably. After all, I always have Linux Mint to fall back on, which seems to do most everything quite well. Go figure.
Much obliged to those of you willing to read my online diatribes.