Except at getting drivers and xorg.conf to play nicely, aaaaaand good luck OC'ing your cards if they don't want to take orders from cgminer.
I've run Xubuntu on my main rig the past year, and if I didn't see myself out of the GPU business in a few months, I'd actually chuck $100 at a Windows license.
SSH is nice though.
You must be new here. There was no cgminer back in 2010, aticonfig did the job just fine.