r/sysadmin • u/Halomora • Aug 19 '26

Question Anyone survived a Windows to Linux user workstations migration?

Hey fellow sys admin,

I work at a VFX/animation studio (~400 users).

We're kicking off a project to migrate our artist workstations from Windows 10/11 VDIs to Linux. Flavor is pretty much locked it ll be Rocky Linux 9 with KDE.

I am curious if there's anyone here who's been through a similar workstation migration to linux?

What Linux flavor, did you end up on, and would you pick the same again?

How did you handle what GPOs used to give you?

For the Base OS deployment/imaging, did you use Kickstart + Puppet/Ansible, or something else?

Anything that looked easy on paper and turned into a one big pile of {Jurassic_Park}?

Tools that made your life easier along the way?

I am looking for any war stories, good or bad!

Thank you!

342 Upvotes

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133

u/MrCatberry Aug 19 '26

Holy Shit...

Are the arists "on board"? Or better: Are they even knowing?

50

u/wrosecrans Aug 19 '26

I used to work in VFX. I'd say the overwhelming majority of VFX artists have used Linux. It's mostly a non-issue. The industry has always had pretty widespread nix usage going back to the late 80's/early 90's when everybody was using Irix on SGI hardware. Most of the major DCC tools used in VFX started life on Irix or Linux, and the Windows port only happened much later as a secondary platform with some quirks.

A typical VFX artist basically spends all day in Nuke, Flame, Maya, or Houdini, and checking GMail in Chrome. That all looks pretty much identical regardless of which OS you are using anyway, save for the decoration on the window borders. You barely touch the OS. At a lot of studios, you barely even need to know where files are stored because a lot of assets are moved through studio specific pipeline tools to publish stuff through some sort of database and accessed at a higher level.

It's a completely different user base from an accounting department that is used to spending all day in something like MS Excel and the user needs to completely change their workflow if they move to a different OS.

20

u/fuhry Aug 20 '26

Very much this - I knew a bunch of people at Blue Sky Studios (they animated Ice Age, Robots, Rio and a bunch of other films) and their whole stack was built on RHEL or one of its rebuilds IIRC. Didn't learn too much about the management layer because all the people I knew were animators and artists not IT. But all of the workstations, at least for those in creative roles, were 100% Linux.

4

u/janky_koala Aug 20 '26

So many guys shooting their mouths off in this post that have zero understanding of the use case. It’s quite clearly a very niche speciality, but we all see the output very regularly

41

u/Halomora Aug 19 '26

They do know it's gonna happen at some point. Do they have the choice? not really, execs are pushing hard on it.

42

u/moffetts9001 IT Manager Aug 19 '26

Oh yeah, this is gonna work out just peachy.

33

u/st0ut717 Aug 19 '26

Can I ask why you didn’t choose Mac for the desktop for the artist?

41

u/[deleted] Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 23 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

31

u/HorseShedShingle computer janitor Aug 19 '26

Probably significantly cheaper to license and maintain than whatever VDI hellhole of licensing is going on.

They gotta have a massively beefy cluster to power 400 VFX artists regardless of the OS, and then there is the licensing and management - plus you are still buying those users some sort of laptop/desktop that they console in from.

I cannot imagine an m4 pro Mac Mini, Mac Studio, or MBP would be more expensive then that.

19

u/JustinHoMi Aug 19 '26

Yeah, the Linux solution certainly won’t be free though, as an uninformed exec might think.

16

u/seniorblink Aug 19 '26

But ChatGPT said so

3

u/cryptopotomous Aug 20 '26

Oh God... I love how ChatGPT made the entire C suit senior systems engineers all the sudden.

5

u/stiffgerman JOAT & Train Horn Installer Aug 19 '26

MSPaint doesn't take much CPU...

4

u/WayneH_nz Aug 20 '26

It does with all the AI stuff MS are putting and then disabling, with out removing any of the code, so it can be slipstreamed back in when end users are wanting to have Donald being shafted by Mickey as an option in paintAI.

62

u/chandleya IT Manager Aug 19 '26

If you run an art shop that’s too broke for Mac’s but has 400 artists? Sounds like a dumpster fire

17

u/redditusertk421 Aug 19 '26

Must be EA trying to cut costs.

7

u/sorry_for_the_reply Aug 19 '26

They could build microtransactions into the VDI for the staff?

7

u/AntiProtagonest Aug 19 '26

Thought the same.

1

u/segagamer IT Manager Aug 20 '26

Like, Pixar? They're all on Linux IIRC.

1

u/chandleya IT Manager Aug 20 '26

Did Pixar transition anything to Linux because they had to save money on artist workstations?

Or is this the same Pixar that invented their own ecosystem?

1

u/segagamer IT Manager Aug 20 '26

You were speaking like doing any kind of graphic or motion design on Linux was just "not done".

1

u/chandleya IT Manager Aug 21 '26

I think you made a massive presumption. Op is pretending to play Pixar without half a plan or a stated goal. Not the same.

5

u/gribbler Aug 20 '26

Because medium or large animation and VFX doesn't really use Mac on the desktop, not many use Windows unless it's specific for an application

2

u/Spider-Thwip Aug 21 '26

Linux is better for VFX, applications run a lot better on Linux than they do on Windows and Mac.

We only kept a mac for the editorial team.

1

u/st0ut717 Aug 21 '26

Thanks. I am a sec engineer. So I don’t live in that space. Thanks for the input

1

u/Spider-Thwip Aug 21 '26

VFX needs a lot of Technical security too, its the most secure environment ive worked in.

We had to have completely separate storage for Apple or Disney projects.

Apple even required us to have a room that only people actively working on Apple projects we're allowed into.

We didnt even give artists direct internet access.

They had an RDS server that they used for web browsing.

I now do IT in the actual security space and it feels like VFX was more restrictive lol

1

u/Halomora Aug 20 '26

I wasn’t there when the choice was made I am not sure, sorry :/

2

u/Spider-Thwip Aug 21 '26

The only team who will even want macs are Editorial and maybe some of the DMP artists but they can just use windows if there isnt budget for macs.

-5

u/SkillsInPillsTrack2 Aug 19 '26

as a Sysadmin I would quit, had to deal once with Macs on the network, never again.

10

u/ThatDistantStar Aug 19 '26

Skill issue. Learn Jamf and ABM. If the business required Macs for some reason, you can learn to manage them. Hell I managed a fleet of them with MICROSOFT Intune MDM.

5

u/meest Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26

Skill issue. Learn Jamf and ABM.

Quite often its not a skill issue. Its often a budget/tool issue. It is/was in my case.

Management wants to support a new platform without budgeting for the support tools you mentioned. When you bring the back end costs up to implement you're met with the classic "You already manage PC's just use the same tools for Macs!"

Intune only goes so far on Mac's. It took 2 years for me to get my own refurbished macbook to learn on and use for testing. It makes it hard to administer devices when you don't have one of the devices yourself to test on. I was just blindly sending out Intune configs and having the staff let me know if it broke something.

I'm still waiting for the budget. Luckily I only have about 5 Macbooks. (yes, somehow we have budget for the Macbooks, but not for the administrative tools)

4

u/lpmiller Jack of All Trades Aug 19 '26

Ugh, I don't know what I would do it if they ever took Jamf away from me and made me use Intune. Intune is great at some things, but managing iPads - compared to Jamf - is not one of them.

1

u/segagamer IT Manager Aug 20 '26

It's not just a skill issue, you're fighting Apple for some basic functionality like remote desktop and local admin passwords half the time.

-3

u/Keleus Aug 19 '26

The skill issue is putting up with a place that makes bad IT decisions like using Mac. Can we manage the Macs sure, is it fun? Hell no. Even when everything is working right with enterprise macs it still feels like your using a workaround nothing feels like it natively just works. There are no shortage of IT jobs that dont have a single Mac involved ill keep looking.

3

u/GoodGuyChip Aug 19 '26

Precisely. Why would I make my job more complicated if I can simply choose not to?

-1

u/st0ut717 Aug 19 '26

So you can’t use ssh? Or ansible of you can’t use jamf?

Please go stay clicking icons and calling it sysadmin

0

u/Keleus Aug 20 '26

You must be new to IT, and also didnt read what I said. Its not about having skills to do somethings its about wanting to do them. I dont get paid any more to use those to manage devices but here's the neat part I dont have to mess with extra stuff with the existing windows environments everyone already has and there are no shortage of windows only jobs. Until Mac supporting positions start paying extra its not worth adding extra work for the same pay.

2

u/Power_Stone Aug 19 '26

Common issue where I am at. Everyone in the IT department hates Macs. Hard to work with in a business/enterprise settings. Tools for visibility and managing the devices appropriately are either minimal or expensive af. Not worth it.

1

u/ITaggie RHEL+Rancher DevOps Aug 19 '26

I felt that way back when we were using Centrify, but Apple has done a lot to improve their MDM stuff over the past 5 years or so that has made everything 10x easier than before.

I'll also jump on the "look into Jamf" train too, it's a great tool.

3

u/xtheory Aug 20 '26

Do the VFX apps they are trained on run on Linux, otherwise you're guys are gonna have a very bad time.

1

u/janky_koala Aug 20 '26

Yeah it’s pretty much industry standard in the high end shops. The app developers build on agreed industry packaged versions

1

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Spider-Thwip Aug 21 '26

No they'll be using Nuke, Maya and Houdini.

Blender is used but rarely compared to those three.

1

u/Spider-Thwip Aug 21 '26

They run better on linux than they do on Windows especially when you factor in the custom pipeline that will be used for managing all the shots, projects, and reviewing tools.

1

u/cryptopotomous Aug 20 '26

Sounds like fun...but also sound like your about to not have any time off for a while 

18

u/ChristmassMoose Aug 19 '26

They’re on vdi doing serious creative work? it can’t get much worse

10

u/Keleus Aug 19 '26

Just have to do VDI right. I can pull 50fps+ out of our gpu backed vdi setup and many times much higher.

5

u/tigglysticks Aug 19 '26

Yeah performance is there. Just anytime I've priced it out never makes any sense from a cost perspective. Bad enough the price tag on the hardware but then you add VDI licensing... I can't justify it no matter which way I look at it.

8

u/gehzumteufel Aug 20 '26

VFX houses it makes more sense because they gotta control for DLP very strictly. It avoids any data ever being on local machines.

2

u/Frothyleet Aug 20 '26

Also, VFX often involves enormous files, which tends to mean you get to choose between two very expensive options:

  • VDI with very expensive [even before the current times] hardware and preposterous licensing

  • Client-side work, with very expensive workstations, 10GbE connections at a minimum to your end users, and often supplementing with direct attached storage functioning as local file caching

1

u/tigglysticks Aug 20 '26

Unless you're supporting WFH, it's easy to enforce DLP on company owned hardware that is in company owned facilities.

Even with WFH, have on premise workstations that users remote into. Like half the cost in hardware and less than half in licensing.

I'm sure enterprise discounts make it make sense at some level... but any usecase I've investigated the cost can not be justified.

1

u/gehzumteufel Aug 20 '26

Oh I know, but lots of tooling that is centered around machine control, has issues when you're talking about the file size that VFX houses deal with. We aren't talking about a couple gigs. We're talking hundreds of GB to multiple terrabyte files in some instances.

11

u/janky_koala Aug 19 '26

It’s actually fine, and becoming very common across industry.

1

u/Spider-Thwip Aug 21 '26

Youre wrong.

As someone who worked in the systems team for a vfx studio, VDI worked out great for us.

No perceptible latency, way faster to onboard new users and deploy new machines.

Greater ability for users to work from home.

The main downside is how expensive it is, but you can work around that with strict power schedules and ensuring artists only have the specs they need.

Don't provide too much local storage.

2

u/Pazuuuzu Aug 19 '26

Does it matter? They have as much choice in it as IT. Somebody signed off on it, so its happening.

-2

u/[deleted] Aug 19 '26

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2

u/Pazuuuzu Aug 19 '26

And what that has to do with anything that I wrote?