DDS is something I'd love to see being used as much as possible as it should reduce loading times considerably. We are already enabling texture compression when uploading to GPU, but offline compression(DDS) will usually offer better quality.
In the past there have been patent issues with S3TC(DDS) compression on Linux. But this seems to have been dealt with, so that we can try it I guess.
New build with DDS support, tested with DXT1/3/5 (vdrift-2013-04-01.exe):
https://sourceforge.net/projects/vdrift/...%20builds/