I've been using Linux (Ubuntu) alongside my mac for almost a year, and have to say they are getting there, the os interface is really nice, customizable and there are apps that in time have come to be as good (some even equal or better) than the windows and mac counterparts. It is true that there are some limitations when talking about photography software, but there are workarounds, and it is not as much as a tinkering issue anymore like some one said, there are other distributions where you don't even have to install anything at all to start using any kind of media and to install one app is just a matter of looking for it in a software center or a command line on terminal.
About photography and linux, well, there are no lightroom or aperture, or even capture one, you could use lightroom on windows inside a VM, or perhaps try to run it using wine, but that's not the goal, the goal is to use it with linux, but still there are some tools you can use, software like bibble, lightzone, rawtherapee, ufraw, gimp, etc etc etc, maybe not as good as the alternatives in mac and windows, but really really good, I guess maybe for a beginner or an amateur could be plenty enough, it was for me, but since I have a mac and aperture is 80 dls, well. But if I had no mac, it would we a tough choice between windows and linux, and most of all because of the speed linux can give you compared to windows in the same base system.