Nope. Most uptodate Linux distros, particularly the main ones, have essentially “plug and play” approaches to USB drives. Fedora Core 3 in particular is rather good at this.
Usually, the difficulty is not in getting Linux to recognize the device. It’s in getting it to work automatically. If you have an off-brand or some other less popular variation of a device, it’s less likely that the default scripts will handle it properly (because the developers sometimes/usually don’t have access to the less common brands, and they can’t test on them), thus requiring the user (i.e. you) to customize the scripts, or simply load the drivers by hand all the time.