Mailing the story:

"... for a while now, I've been asked the same question on many occasions, a question I did not previously have a good answer to, "Can I use IrfanView with Debian [Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.]". Before recently my answer was always "You can't use IrfanView, as it's only available for Windows, and there isn't a good IrfanView equivalent for GNU/Linux." Well, I'm happy to say as of version 2.11.3 that I can now tell people that gThumb is as good as IrfanView, if not better."