Thank you!! Finally, after a long time trying many things, something worked!

Excellent! After installing some repos related to libmobiledevice and following ifuse instructions, finally Shotwell does workson iphone 8!

As Rafael mentioned below,

it works!

i need a way to transfer photos from a linux pc to my iphone.. i know, that's backwards for most people, but being a photographer that doesn't use the phones camera presents a whole new set of problems... any advice would be greatly appreciated.