That's not really distro specific (even tho there are some available which have the basic tools for recovery, e.g. knoppix)
The majority of recovery tools are available for all most common distros (e.g. debian based).

You'll have a higher success rate on linux since there are way more (and better) free tools available for linux than for windows.


The chosen tool itself depends on the situation. An example would be:
For imaging / cloning the drive: dd
To correct partition level issues: Testdisk
To recover specific files based on ending (ignores file system): Photorec (is part of Testdisk)