It’s mainly in large facilities that run huge jobs with massive amounts of data. Maya, Nuke, Houdini, Flame, Baselight, many in-house VFX software all run perfectly well Linux. And of course the cornucopia of renderers running on their server farms, as might be more expected.

The lineage is from SGI, where many of these applications were born, but as the company faltered and consumer graphics hardware took off thanks to gaming, Linux became the natural home.