One possible improvement here is to use sys.platform.startswith('linux') then allow the plugin developers to simply use "linux" instead of linux2 per http://docs.python.org/2/library/sys.html#sys.platform.

In python 2.x linux is marked as "linux2"
In python 3.x linux is marked simply as "linux"

Since we only support python 2.x at the moment my opinion is that using linux2 isn't a big deal and in our project we can easily switch to "linux" format when we port to python3 in the future. Supporting both at the moment isn't a requirement.

If we want to support both this one line of code will need to  be expanded into multiple lines increasing the size of maintained code which is another reason why I think it's ok that we simply stick with calling everything linux2 in the plugins for now.