I also like tabs a lot. I don't get the "width" issue though, because it doesn't matter if a tab is 1cm or 5cm. The code will still be indented properly. So I haven't had any problems with that, but I rarely use linux, so I don't know if they have problems there or now. I haven't had any problems in Code::Blocks, Notepad++, VS and Wordpad. Works flawlessly everywhere. So it's seems to be a linux issue.
The problem with tabs is that each editor can be configured to display them differently, so code written in some editor will likely look different in another one. It will still be properly indented but it may become too wide to be comfortably read, or things might end up misleadingly aligned when they shouldn't.
It's not a Linux issue.