I seem to recall I had that too (which directly contradicts to my previous statement about "out of the box" but hey I should have made sure to use a current wine version to launch it in the first place). It went away after upgrading wine. You should get the newest stable wine version if you do not already have it. Ubuntu and Mint are distributed by default with too old versions so you should override the default wine version by following these instructions from WineHQ (https://wiki.winehq.org/Ubuntu). Stable release branch should be enough. I have version of 3.something; I can double check my version later today. Oh and you should launch Poser from the command line; it will output relevant information of what happens when Poser freezes. It may or may not help depending on your understanding of the output; the most easiest to fix would be complaints about missing or incorrect versions of .NET libraries or dlls that are required.

You said you had issues with Poser Pro 2014. The only (and really really annoying) I had was that library did not function. It was because of the idiotic choice to use Adobe's old Flex/Air/Flash technology to make it. I ended up shutting it down altogether and used an external library manager (I use Shaderworks' Library Manager; unfortunately no longer available. It worked beautifully for me but I do believe there are other external library managers out there). I was never able to satisfyingly solve the PP2014 library issue although I was able to run the library in an IE Expolorer instance which allowed drag'n'drop to Poser but it was frustating because of my limited desktop space.

I, on the other hand, have never been able to run DS. I gave up a year ago. It did install and all but crashes constantly in my system and without any predictable pattern. No matter since I prefer Poser anyway.