Linear receivers offer a low complexity option for multi-antenna communication systems. Therefore, understanding the outage behavior of the corresponding SINR is important in a fading mobile environment. In this paper we introduce a large deviations method, valid nominally for a large number M of antennas, which provides the probability density of the SINR of Gaussian channel MIMO Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) and zero-forcing (ZF) receivers, with arbitrary transmission power profiles and in the presence of receiver antenna correlations. This approach extends the Gaussian approximation of the SINR, valid for large M asymptotically close to the center of the distribution, obtaining the non-Gaussian tails of the distribution. Our methodology allows us to calculate the SINR distribution to next-to-leading order (O(1/M)) and showcase the deviations from approximations that have appeared in the literature (e.g. the Gaussian or the generalized Gamma distribution). We also analytically evaluate the outage probability, as well as the uncoded bit-error-rate. We find that our approximation is quite accurate even for the smallest antenna arrays (2x2).