Hi Jay, I know where you are coming from with trying to escape from the Windows environment, and I have tried Linux several times in the past, but lack of decent modelling software that supports NURBS kept driving me back to Windows and all the problems associated with it. Wine will run and is supported in Ubuntu and as Michael says, MoI3d will run happily within that environment.
NVidia also support Ubuntu Linux with official drivers, but that does mean that you will only get support for the graphics cards that NVidia have decided are still worth supporting, I don't know what their policy is for the support lifespan of a product, but as long as you have a recent graphics card you should be good for several years and will probably be supported with updates longer than what it will take to outgrow the cards performance.
ATI Cards are sadly a different kettle of fish with very few cards being fully supported under Linux of any flavour.
If you are fully Intel based, the alternative route is the one that I have taken (for now) and am still testing. But check your motherboard support for OSX and you can possibly make a Hackintosh. I do not endorse this method unless you know your hardware really well and it's a task not for the faint of heart, but it is do able, and you then get true native support on the Mac platform. You are then left with the dilema of getting a good render engine, which the OSX platform has but a few. This then applies even more so to Linux.
My experience with Linux render engines of any decent quality, all seem to want be either scripted through the command line interface, a slow and painfully tedious task, or that they piggy back on Blender as a plugin. Once you are into that situation, you are then at the mercy of Blender and how it strips the mapping and voxels (please correct me if i am wrong) from imported models forcing you to do all the editing and topology changes yourself in order to get good quality renders, which then means a huge learning curve if you have not used Blender in the past.
However Cinema 4D and Keyshot are available on the OSX platform. As are some others, I was looking at Shade13 and decided to purchase a basic licence but goofed up on their ordering system and now have a windows key which I am waiting to see what they will do about, as of yet (3 days) they have not replied with any intended actions. At least you wont get that level of ignorance here with MoI no matter what platform you decide upon.
Hope this helps you come to a decision.
Martin Spencer-Ford
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