Officially, the Unity Game Engine supports Ubuntu from 12.04 onwards, older versions may fail to run KSP as they may be missing dependencies that they cannot install, and other flavours of Linux may also struggle a bit.
That's always a good idea. The main thing when making a shuttle is to crash repeatedly to figure out what is needed. In my case, everything happened be balanced for the shuttle to work.
One thing I did find was that piping the fuel from the upper side mounted 64 tanks to the *second* dropping ones helped out a lot. Keeping the last two Mainsails around for another tankfull achieved much more altitude. I'm thinking of moving the pipes over to the first pair of Mainsails to keep all the big engines around longer than the first two drop.