Thanks for that, frankbell. The "some versions of" suggests that the cardreader route is the most likely longer-term solution. From the reviews I gather that one has to be careful putting the card in, so as not to bend the pins. Well, you would, wouldn't you?
It's still a mystery why it has always worked with my laptop, but not with my wife's, both running the same distro.
And thank you Soadyheid for suggesting the cardreader in the first place.

It could be a power thing, have you tried putting a powered usb hub in the middle? You could also have a difference in installed packages.

$ dpkg -l

On each machine and diff the results. Depending on the camera type you could do it manually. Some act like usb storage devices. Some speak a protocol which gphoto2 can deal with.

$ gphoto2 --get-all-files

$ sudo mount /dev/... /mnt/pictures

I would guess that if it's not the power thing (laptop usb ports are normally under powered), then you're missing some packages like autofs or some such. To rule that out, it would probably be simpler to clone your expected behavior install to a usb stick and boot that on the other machine. A different live system, a little rsync magic, change /etc/fstab to it's new location, update it's bootloader, and you're off to the races. Well bios/uefi magic to boot from usb anyway. Plus skipping over a few steps like the usual origami instructions.

I forgot my xd camera was a Fuji. I never used the cable supplied with that camera either since early 2000.
Just remove the card and load pictures on my laptop and desktop computers.

I found a Dazzle XD card reader at the Goodwill Store for $00.25. It works Just fine from Puppy and every other Linux distro out there. From my Pentium 3 usb 1.1 on up to my Pentium 4 usb 3.0.

I still have the camera. It still works. I really like the panorama snapshot function. It is a good fixed lens camera for cheap.

Wife bought me a newer camera with a telescopic lens feature. Uses a SD card. So I put the fuji on the computer storage shelf in my man cave. The Dazzle card reader is also in the camera case.

Post back if your ordered xd card reader solves your problem.

Yes. My nice new card reader does the job perfectly. Time to mark this question solved, I think, though I'll look at dpkg -l out of curiosity.