It's easier than ever to get your images from print and cameras. Backends have been written for most digital cameras, even cheap, old and obscure ones. The same can be said for scanners, though the situation for parallel scanners is not as good. Card readers obliviate the need for clients by directly accesing the images. At the same time, the clients are providing excelent specialized interfaces. Though there are missing features from many camera drivers, the free software user gains consistent interfaces to their many devices and are liberated from client software obsolescence. New devices and old are constantly being added to the backend software and older device support is continually improved.
A caveat for Debian users is that USB permissions are not set up correctly by default. Mepis may do this, but upgrading can destroy the set up. Fedora and other distributions work out of the box. I get around this with card readers and by accessing cameras as the root user.