I don't think so. And I'm starting to think it has to do with the amount of geometry displayed / scale, or possibly video hardware.
To that point, I had no issues whatsoever zooming in on a cube. But when I loaded some highway alignment data from a LandXML file (which is a couple thousand feet in scale), the first attempt to zoom in yielded much the same result as before: I saw a little motion, but then it blanked until the routine finished and then redrew the screen. (edit: again, that's running the zoom from inside a Gui.Command call, not from the python console)
What's interesting is, if I zoomed out and reran the zoom macro, it worked perfectly, which immediately suggests some sort of caching is taking place that Linux needs but Windows does not.
This might also be related to my video card. NVidia is rather less-than-great on Linux, after all.
As for next steps.. I'm not really sure.