They're doing this with Kickstarter because they can't get any publishers to fund a game in this style.
Wasteland 2 is using the Unity engine, and they probably saw the progress that had been made with it, and decided to use it too. The little scene they showed off from Wasteland 2 looks fine.
Unity engine added support for Linux a month ago, and one game has already shipped using its Linux support. It's no longer a hypothetical, it has happened.
A lot of strong opinions here, but you guys should read up on this stuff before you start criticizing everything about it. It's not like this is secret info.