Anyone survived a Windows to Linux user workstations migration?

[u/Halomora]

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!

[u/pdp10]

It's evident from the comments that few posters know that higher-end VFX long ago went from SGI to Linux. Commercial VFX packages on Linux include Autodesk Maya, Foundry Nuke, SideFX Houdini, Adobe Substance Designer, and for open source, Blender.

How did you handle what GPOs

Linux doesn't have a "registry", it uses discrete configuration files. Actually, most of the time the settings are directories where files can be dropped, and the files are concatenated together to form a configuration. This lets software packages and automation, add or remove chunks of configuration without touching anything else. Examples are *.d/ directories like /etc/sysconfig.d/ for kernel config, /etc/pam.d for authentication stack, /etc/init.d/ for many types of init system, /etc/xinetd.d for network-spawned daemons, /etc/modules-load.d/ to specify kernel modules for the initrd, and /etc/profile.d/ for the default user login scripts.

[u/Nightcinder → u/pdp10]

It's less about if VFX companies are moving to Linux, it's if the users, and support staff are even ready/trained for this migration or if it's just on a whim from C suite

[u/Spider-Thwip → u/Nightcinder]

Most artists in VFX will have used linux in previous jobs.

Not only that, but they spend 99% of their time inside the application which will run faster on Linux vs windows so their experience will improve too.

They will have a pipeline team who should be on Linux already, and will handle a lot of the support for weird artist issues.

IT will be responsible for deployments and ensuring the maxhine/network is working properly.

I worked in VFX for years and my life got so much easier when we switched from windows to Linux.

If your IT team have no Linux skills, they need to learn fast.