Why do major animation studios use linux?

I am curious as to why most of the major animation studios use Linux as their primary OS. What technical advantages does it give them?

There are a bunch of reasons, but here’s a very general list of reasons: low overhead (in terms of system performance as well as license costs), highly customizable, easily automated/scripted for maintenance (deployment, updates, etc.), reasonably simple remote management, and… to some extent, it’s what the people running their IT shops are comfortable with.

Indiependence & liberty

I use Linux so that I don’t have to worry about viruses and waste money on anti virus software. We got very few viruses on Linux for now.

Linux is easy on resources. You don’t need to run those windows services that you don’t use.

Here’s the story as I recall it (though I’m not and wasn’t in Hollywood so if anyone has better information I’ll defer to them):

Back in the day (up until the mid-90’s), most of the digital animation studios used Unix workstations and servers from the likes of SGI and Sun. While the Unix vendor’s stuff was arguably very nice and powerful, it was also very, very expensive… esp for servers, even when you factored in their standard discounts off list price.

As Linux matured and PCs became more powerful (both needed to happen) in the mid to late 90’s they (software vendors and Hollywood) were able to easily migrate most of their rendering software and workflows over to Linux with minimal effort and for a fraction of the cost (both up front and ongoing) OS X wasn’t an option until the mid-200x’s and Windows required significant changes (often a rewrite) so it’s not clear if either would have been more popular choices had they been viable options at the time. While there were probably some cases where the complete control and customization that Linux can offer was appealing, I suspect that cost was the bigger driver as they had relatively limited budgets but needed ever increasing compute power for their renderfarms as digital took off in Hollywood.

I daresay it was pretty much a “no-brainer” to use Linux. The shops were already working in a “Unix-ish” way, both in terms of the software environment that their applications were written for, and in terms of how they handled the work flow. Linux offered them a way-forward that was a “comfortable” change, easy to justify technically and business-wise. Linux was completely open, very adaptable to many different types of hardware, and demonstratedly rugged and dependable.Any “other operating-system” would have been, well, “another completely-different operating system,” hence a completely different way of doing, well, everything. Not the sort of thing that any data-processing shop really wants to be faced with. Especially not when “what the computer does, is literally What They Do.”

Simplicity. OS X and Windows both have a huge amount of software running and in the case of Windows undocumented dependencies and coupling.

Linux allows you the freedom (if you have the experience to use it) to have your computer do exactly what you want it to, and nothing more. This means that you do not waste hardware resources doing something that someone else thought was necessary to serve the lowest common denominator in their customer base.

Is this also true for more user friendly distros, like Ubuntu?

Is what true… that studios use Linux on the desktop? I would suspect not nearly to the degree they use it for servers/renderfarms. There are all sorts of creative client side apps/addons that still only run on Windows or OS X. For example: I’m an individual developer and user who is about 99% on Linux yet I have one use case that requires Windows (for now, and only a few times a year) and a couple that require OS X (semi-frequently, not likely to change anytime soon.) These use cases start to pile up as needs get more complex and specialized.

I was asking if distros like Ubuntu also used smaller hardware resources than OSX or Windows.

To my knowledge one of the big reasons today is task scheduling. Y’all saw the story about Big Hero 6 using a 55,000 core supercomputer, that’s just a network of all the computers at Disney cranking out complex rendering tasks during the off-hours.

Because major studios have robust development teams, Linux trades off a lot of traditional ease-of-use for some hard technical flexibility. Almost no graphic design firm today would use Linux because Linux offers no benefits to making logos and pamphlets; instead they just get a bunch of nice iMacs because they work without any complication. But feature films and running a studio entails some major data processing and its valuable to have that power built into your pipeline.

Ah, OK… a bit less for desktop apps but the difference isn’t nearly as large as it used to be.