I'm not sure if this should belong in Android or in the Linux section so there's that...
My experience with flashing a Note 3 LTE on a Linux system via Heimdall hasn't been great at all. I've never made a successful flash at all since I couldn't even get the PIT (Partition Information) file.
I have the Note 2 and I don't regularly flash it but every few months I change rom and kernel and aside form me messing something stupid it is always smooth.
Although I will say that recently ODIN has been giving me trouble with PIT, but I never use it anyway, it is all internalised on my phone now, I download, backup and flash all from my phone.
Find another way round.
Are you using fast boot or something else?
Its a breeze with my nexus 4, but as i learned when messing with my brother's phone samsung devices (among others) tend to be easier to break when flashing stuffs. With my nexus 4 the worst that can happen is leaving it with nothing to boot, and even then its easy to flash a factory image and you're right back to stock.
Tsk tsk tsk. Samsung can be very annoying. One time (This was on Windows BTW) Samsung released an OTA for my dads phone through Kies. Funny thing is that I rooted it and flashed a custom recovery and the OTA bricked the phone because of the custom recovery.
On the one plus one it is so easy. Some roms don't even void your warranty.
Heimdahl has worked flawlessly for me on several Samsung phones. I like Samsung phones partly because they are generally easy to flash in my experience, work as they should with the android dev tools in linux and are unbrickable with linux. There are some things though:
- the android dev tools (with the android debugger or adb), have to be fully installed for everything to work. Not all distros have a well maintained android dev tools package. If you go for enterprise grade distros that specialize in development, that isn't a problem though. On some distros, you actually have to use older versions for it to work, like 4 year old versions in some cases for Ubuntu.
- adb has to be run as root. That is normal, because it has to change things on a system level in the android device, and with the way adb works, that means it has to be run as root on the host PC. This makes things a bit more complicated. The best and most secure thing to do is to use it in a development environment, like one would use for general dev work or for packaging.
- the easiest way to flash a phone is still through the SD card using either recovery loader. Most things based on community developed ROMs are possible via the SD card.
I'm not sure if Fastboot is applicable to Samsung.
Preaching to the quire. HTC released a faulty RUU for my Droid DNA so now it's bricked. I guess you can only really go Google for a good Android experience.