Photon program without particle IDE

There are some clues on how to set up a local environment here.
There’s also this (really neat) installer for Windows to do this for you.
The USB issue is most likely related to the virtual setup, but that shouldn’t stop you entirely. If all you want to do is flash it, then you can program/code/compile in windows, and then flash the resulting files via linux (I’d think). Not ideal, but it should work.