@Thunderwave -- I heartily recommend it, as I have found that with a few exceptions, everything *I* want/need to do, I can do natively and that which I can't, for the most part, WINE helps bridge the gap. Now, anything that requires the newer .Net framework things get dicey and that's where I would recommend a VirtualBox VM of WindowsXP or 7. I've been running that setup for ~7 months, now, and it has actually helped me with programming as the apps I've been working on in .NET I've been able to bring into Mono C# with little effort. At any rate, as far as programs,
Gimp is, of course, your friend. It's not PhotoShop, but it's more than usable (I've used it since it was a 0.x program and still get lost...by the same token, I've used PhotoShop since v1.2 and get lost in it, a lot, too...). For non-linear editing of your anims, I would definitely recommend KDEnLive. I've been using it for the past few weeks and found that it only *really* gets crabby when you import 5000 frames at a time. I know you do music, so I would also recommend Audacity. It's the only program I've found (Windows or otherwise) that can fine-tune it's latency timings to a point to allow me to do multitrack recording with my DigiTech RP350 via USB.
Now, for the nitty gritty: MDZ is fantastic. It's interface is a little lean, but what it lacks in UI refinement it makes up in the ability to throw 1024+ bits of arbitrary precision at your zoom. From there, the old standbys are Fraqtive, Xaos and GnoFract4D -- which has the added bonus of having maps you can use in MDZ! -- and they're all solid. My only kibitz with those three is that when it comes to deep zooms, you get to "um, no." after about 14 zooms, usually, somewhere around 10^12. For the 3D side, I *really* like Mandelbulber. My brain hasn't figured out how to do that anim side, yet, but the stills are gorgeous and it's interface is pretty simple to use AND the palette tool is really slick as you can load a palette from another image. VERY cool. Of course, I've also discovered that some images will blow it up, but you know...
Wine is your friend and make sure you get the latest build. It handles UF5, Apophysis and ChaosPro 4 very well. Mandelbulb3D also works like a champ under WINE. I fact, all of my successful anims have come out of it.
Hope that helps and I hope your installation went painlessly. What distro did you decide upon?
@Trifox -- cool, thanks. Of course, now my right-brained self is looking at that saying, "well, that makes sense," and then turning itself off.
I'll mess with that and see what I can come up with. I may bounce a practice one up here just to make sure that something didn't get translated in my brain improperly. The instructions seem simple enough, so I don't forsee that being too much of a problem. We shall see. Thanks, again!