I tend to run Linux on VMware within my Windows box
Ditto, but via VirtualBox.
Having said that, I am an owner of SOASE and would love to be able to play it on Linux.
Same here, quietly hoping that should there ever be a Sins2 that it would be available on both Windows & Linux. I did re-install a previous laptop with OpenSuSE 13 and tried to get Sins Rebellion running under Wine. It started and showed the main screen with one of the titans in the background, but crashed as soon as you attempted to use the UI. Other users here (Thoumsin), running Ubuntu, have had far better results. IIRC, they even got past the 2Gb limit.
I will say this much, though: modding Galactic Civilizations 3 would be a heckuva LOT easier on Linux.
I've not modded GC3, but I'm not at all surprised by that statement. When I contributed to the SoTYR & SoA2 Sins mods I did consider doing some of the grunt scripting work on Linux VM, though that did seem overkill. Thankfully
Cygwin sufficed for that.
I would be concerned about performance and mysterious driver issues
What may also be a concern for developers though is the variation between the different families of Linux distros, eg Ubuntu(Debian), Fedora(RedHat) and SuSE, which often have variations on naming conventions for stuff like shared libraries etc.