VFX & Animation Studios Urged To Upgrade To RHEL 9 Or Rocky Linux / AlmaLinux 9

[Mar2ck]

Ubuntu seems to be fairly universal, which shows the power of marketing, I guess? Either that or people liked Debian but hated the installer? Dunno really.

From the report pdf:

Neither Debian nor Mint have options to pay for additional support or services, so they did not qualify for consideration.

[mroche]

Jedibeeftrix tildearrow

I recommend reading the actual reports rather than just the snippets Michael provides in the article. You'll see the following statement:

In order to make a recommendation for a Linux distribution, the VFX Linux Task Force had to identify suitable options to research and assess. Given the urgency, the decision was made to only assess Linux distributions or distribution vendors that were represented in the 2021 Studio Platform Survey Report.

SUSE and its family were not represented at all in the survey. As mentioned by others here, the Red Hat family has pretty much been the de facto standard since the switch away from SGI/IRIX.

VFX Reference Platform Distribution Recommendation
VFX Reference Platform 2021 Studio Survey Report

Cheers,
Mike

[jorgepl]

In an ideal world, the developers and engineers in studios who are very well versed in computer graphics would be able to spend working hours on making the Linux desktop have the best graphics story of all time. However, that is not their job nor their interest. Their job is to improve and enhance the tooling and techniques of their studio, working on cutting edge developments to produce efficient pipelines and the best imagery possible. They don't particularly have the time to work with multiple different fundamental upstream Linux platform development groups.

That's where distribution developers with stakeholders in the field come into play, such as Red Hat and Canonical. The studios collaborate and communicate with us to help us better understand their problems and needs, which we can then take to the upstream communities we're already active participants in. It's a middle man process, but it works for businesses who's focus isn't on the operating system.

As someone who participated in some of these discussions over the past year or so, the industry knows it can't sit completely idle anymore if it wants Linux to be a sustainable and competitive platform. So, I'm looking forward to the conversations we'll be having, and maybe - just maybe - we'll also see some new faces in the upstream projects.

Cheers,
Mike

May I ask you which distro do you work in?

[Vistaus]

At least in the field I'm in, everyone who wants to use Linux and is American or who worked in America wants RedHat, while many Profs who are from or worked in Europe early in their careers prefer SuSE.

Really? I'm European and all I hear in corporate is Red Hat, Red Hat, Red Hat or Ubuntu, Ubuntu, Ubuntu. (Or ChromeOS, depending on whether you count that as a Linux distro or not.) SuSE is never mentioned.

[mroche]

May I ask you which distro do you work in?

I am currently a solution architect at Red Hat. So I don't work on RHEL itself, but I am a someone who would be communicating with customers. Before this I was a Linux sysadmin at Blue Sky Studios.

Cheers,
Mike

[scottishduck]

Far as I can tell the support given to RHEL by Red Hat is many levels above what canonical does for Ubuntu

[MadeUpName]

How are the proprietary graphics drivers on SuSE? I suspect non-existant. CUDA or openCL is mandatory in this space and the free/open drivers aren't there yet.

[scottishduck]

How are the proprietary graphics drivers on SuSE? I suspect non-existant. CUDA or openCL is mandatory in this space and the free/open drivers aren't there yet.

Suse gets official packaged drivers directly from nvidia and has done for a very very long time, if anything they’re gold standard for support on that end.

[qarium]

How are the proprietary graphics drivers on SuSE? I suspect non-existant. CUDA or openCL is mandatory in this space and the free/open drivers aren't there yet.

i think this strongly depent on what kind of hardware you have... my threadripper 1920x with vega64 is very well supported...
ROCm+HIP with OpenCL and also HIP(source code translation from cuda ) works.
and it works with free and open source drivers... if you believe it or not..

but yes this is very tight means older hardware maybe does not work and much never hardware also maybe does not work.

[MadeUpName]

i think this strongly depent on what kind of hardware you have... my threadripper 1920x with vega64 is very well supported...
ROCm+HIP with OpenCL and also HIP(source code translation from cuda ) works.
and it works with free and open source drivers... if you believe it or not..

but yes this is very tight means older hardware maybe does not work and much never hardware also maybe does not work.

Do you have image support?