Well, it kinda works in a virtual machine, too. For personal use I set up a WinXP virtual machine with the free VmWare Player software and it ran Nexus just fine. Well, performance wasn't too great and shadows looked glitchy, but I suppose it's enough for modding purposes.
That's on my Windows 7 as host OS, though. Don't know, if it also works as well with a Linux host.