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

[phoronix]

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

VFX Reference Platform as a standards body that aims to help standardize software platforms in the realm of digital content creation (DCC) has published a detailed report for studios to consider in choosing their next Linux platform. Their new recommendations for visual effects and animation studios about moving to newer Linux distributions over the next year -- especially with many still relying on CentOS 7 -- is for moving to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 otherwise one of the downstreams like Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux. Close behind in their recommendations and as a longer-term objective is also tossing some support behind Ubuntu Linux...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/VFX-Animation-Linux-Recommends

[pranav]

Can't these big guys like VFX & Animation Studios help/collaborate with Linux/Wayland/GNOME in projects like HDR, or something related to graphics?!

I think if everybody *help each other openly, then Linux will be a sexy, refined, fantastic project.

[mroche]

Can't these big guys like VFX & Animation Studios help/collaborate with Linux/Wayland/GNOME in projects like HDR, or something related to graphics?!

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

[Jedibeeftrix]

Does SLES/SLED feature at all in the DCC industry?

[tildearrow]

Poor openSUSE nobody seems to give a crap about...

How is Ubuntu an "excellent Linux distribution"? What about openSUSE? Have you guys opened your eyes or only know about Ubuntu?

[Paradigm Shifter]

Poor openSUSE nobody seems to give a crap about...

How is Ubuntu an "excellent Linux distribution"? What about openSUSE? Have you guys opened your eyes or only know about Ubuntu?

RedHat = America
SuSE = Europe

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.

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.

Perhaps it is also about locality of paid support in the event of issues?

There was an overall shift toward RedHat because of CentOS (and Scientific Linux) but I do still know a few SuSE diehards

I have a soft spot for SuSE (second Linux distro, bought it in a retail store, came on 7 CDs and 2 DVDs with 2" thick manuals) but I'm more a Debian/Arch user than RPM, due in part to RedHat distros kernel panicking at boot on some quad-socket G34 boxes I needed to use and path of least resistance to getting them working was Debian.

[leech]

Poor openSUSE nobody seems to give a crap about...

How is Ubuntu an "excellent Linux distribution"? What about openSUSE? Have you guys opened your eyes or only know about Ubuntu?

While I tend to agree with what you're saying here. The fact remains that Ubuntu used to be the equivalent of 'Debian for beginners' which made it have an excellent base and a great start at getting popular. Then once they had the fan base, they decided to start with what many consider lock-in, only making some things available via snap, etc. Sure, you can enable snap in other distros... but it's.. gross. Seems to me RHEL (or derivatives) have sort of always been the go to for the VFX and Animation industry. These are generally not the people who use things like Photoshop. These are the ones who use things like Maya and SoftImage. The things that SGI/IRIX was the king of at one point. If you want the stability of IRIX, I'd go RHEL as well.

[Svyatko]

Poor openSUSE nobody seems to give a crap about...

How is Ubuntu an "excellent Linux distribution"? What about openSUSE? Have you guys opened your eyes or only know about Ubuntu?

What about providing Blender in openSUSE Leap? Only 2.82a, even not 2.9x?
IMHO SLE/openSUSE is not interested in VFX/animation/etc industry.

Blender 3.2 & 3.3 works with manual install, but you'll get no help with it from openSUSE.

[skeevy420]

RedHat = America
SuSE = Europe

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.

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.

Perhaps it is also about locality of paid support in the event of issues?

There was an overall shift toward RedHat because of CentOS (and Scientific Linux) but I do still know a few SuSE diehards

I have a soft spot for SuSE (second Linux distro, bought it in a retail store, came on 7 CDs and 2 DVDs with 2" thick manuals) but I'm more a Debian/Arch user than RPM, due in part to RedHat distros kernel panicking at boot on some quad-socket G34 boxes I needed to use and path of least resistance to getting them working was Debian.

I can only speak for myself, but way, way back in the day Debian is what I used and for a while I was happy. The more I got into Linux, the more I realized how old and stale the Debian repositories were so I did what most people here suggest -- I started using the Testing and Sid repositories. It would always start out well enough, but a few months in I'd always take an update that would make something bad happen and a reinstall was usually the easiest option (easy to do if you keep a minimal of two disks -- root and data). That happened with both regular Debian and forks like Siduction. Looking into Debian Sid forks is what led me to Ubuntu.

I did my first Ubuntu install in 2005 or 2006 and ran it until 2009 or 2010. In that time nearly every single distribution upgrade broke my system. Between that and GNOME 3 being in full effect I switched to Arch with XFCE and was a very happy camper until XFCE picked up GTK3. Been a very happy KDE user ever since.

I've used SuSE on and off over the past 10 years (Regular, Open, and Tumbleweed) but I don't stick with it because I don't really like the SuSE way of doing things...which sucks because Tumbleweed is one of the best KDE distributions (if not the best).

IMHO, for new users coming in SuSE has very horrible branding and naming. SuSE, OpenSuSE Leap, and OpenSuSE Tumbleweed. Having all those different but same looking versions makes SuSE look like Windows. There's a reason it's not RHEL, OpenRHEL, OpenRHEL Next, and OpenRHEL More Next and is instead RHEL paid, RHEL free, CentOS, and Fedora. Each distinct distribution has its own name and branding so it's a lot less confusing. On the monetized version users don't pick between RegularRHEL and OpenRHEL -- they pick RHEL and either pay or not pay. I'd suggest that SuSE needs to follow RHEL by getting rid of OpenSUSE Leap and renaming Tumbleweed to something else like Chameleon. If people really want Leap they can Rocky-Alma the SuSE sources.

After fixing that naming y'all need better advertising. Most people don't know to pick SuSE for the best KDE and BTRFS setups around and y'all's website sure doesn't tell me that either. Now I'm gonna scroll the site: First I'm told that it's "The makers' choice"; I'm then given a choice between two different operating systems; a banner ad for one of the two choices; a list of sysadmin things that regular users don't care about and half aren't necessarily desktop related; a mobile optimized news section (the entire page makes Windows 10 feel like I'm on Android, but the News part especially); a large help-wanted section; conference info; and finally the rest of the links that could have been in the header. There isn't a single picture of the desktop, lists of SuSE features outside of the four things for sysadmins, or anything that says why I should pick it over the rest. It barely goes into why I'd pick Tumbleweed or Leap -- the text you get when you click on "More Information" (while inadequate) should be the text under their respective logos. It doesn't differentiate between what Rolling and Regular releases are and why someone would pick which. There's basically nothing there to sell me on SuSE.

Compare that to Red Hat's site that offers up 1 distribution and a bunch of their services. Ditto with the regular SuSE site.

IF THERE'S SOMEONE AFFILIATED WITH SuSE's LEGAL DEPARTMENT HERE -- Apparently there is a company called Chameleon and it rips-off the SuSE logo and colors. If they're not affiliated or owned by SuSE, they sure as hell look like they are by using very similar logos, their name, and colors so y'all should look into that.

[anarki2]

Just switch to Rocky or Alma already.