Most likely the best way to determine the windowing system is to use the "tk windowingsystem" command (http://www.tcl.tk/man/tcl8.5/TkCmd/tk.htm#M10), so something like this:

    root = tkinter.Tk()
    root.call(('tk', 'windowingsystem'))

As documented, the call returns 'x11' for X11-based systems, 'win32' for Windows, and 'aqua' for the native OS X implementations.