This only affects you if you have some source of RAW images, typically a camera would be that source. Then the RAW images need to be post-processed (which of course is something that's already done if you extract JPG's instead of RAW images from the camera) and converted to a target format, like JPG.

Viewers/browsers

The best one I know so far is showfoto, a component of digikam. digikam itself is fussy about images having to be part of albums, but showfoto has an adequate image browser with exif data display and some statistics about the image. It's also worth noting that digikam itself has been given a lot of attention, and has recently developed into a much better and more useful program than it was a few years ago.

Rawstudio also has a rudimentary image browser.

Converters

For this I would advocate ufraw. It's a standalone program, but it's also a plugin for the gimp. The interface is straightforward and quite handy.

showfoto/digikam also has features for conversion, but they are somehow tucked away in the menus and harder to find.

Rawstudio aims to be the tool of choice for this, but for the moment is seems rather immature and the interface could use work.

I think I read somewhere that Krita is supposed to convert its inner colorspace to be 16bit, which would make editing RAW images native, without needing to convert them first. That would be awesome. For the time being, I can't say anything for Krita, because it crashes the moment I start it (probably a bug in the koffice ebuilds).

Status

So the support for RAW images is quite encouraging. Not as nice as in Photoshop CS3, and this applies principally to the conversion options and the types of adjustments that can be made, but decent all the same.