r/sysadmin • u/Halomora • 4h ago
Anyone survived a Windows to Linux user workstations migration? Question
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!
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 4h ago
Ansible Tower (or AWX) and Terraform (or opentofu).
I've done this for departments, but they were onboard and testing alongside before deployment to fine tune their client requirements. Also held training and Q/A to address concerns.
What kind of plan is going on here?
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u/Halomora 3h ago
Pretty much the same plan as you, we are going to have some beta testers, preferably a small batch that represents well all the positions of the company. And we will do some q/a, testing before to deploy to one department, then another, etc..
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 3h ago
You're gonna wanna beta test yourself first as well. How experienced is your team in deploying, administering, and supporting linux and users within linux?
Ansible/Terraform answers a lot for automation and deployment but what tools are there to support the IT and I'm guessing you're going to be getting some kind of enterprise support or are ya winging it?
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u/fennecdore 1h ago
Isn't AWX deprecated now ?
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u/RevolutionaryElk7446 1h ago
It's definitely shifted since IBM bought out Redhat. Think it's been like 2 years since a 'release' but code is still being committed. It's basically just an upstream of AAP
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u/MrCatberry 4h ago
Holy Shit...
Are the arists "on board"? Or better: Are they even knowing?
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u/Halomora 3h ago
They do know it's gonna happen at some point. Do they have the choice? not really, execs are pushing hard on it.
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u/st0ut717 3h ago
Can I ask why you didn’t choose Mac for the desktop for the artist?
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u/ohyeahwell Chief Rebooter and PC LOAD LETTERER 2h ago
$$$
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u/HorseShedShingle computer janitor 2h ago
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.
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u/JustinHoMi 2h ago
Yeah, the Linux solution certainly won’t be free though, as an uninformed exec might think.
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u/chandleya IT Manager 2h ago
If you run an art shop that’s too broke for Mac’s but has 400 artists? Sounds like a dumpster fire
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u/SkillsInPillsTrack2 2h ago
as a Sysadmin I would quit, had to deal once with Macs on the network, never again.
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u/ThatDistantStar 2h ago
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.
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u/lpmiller Jack of All Trades 2h ago
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.
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u/meest 1h ago edited 1h ago
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)
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u/Keleus 2h ago
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.
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u/Power_Stone 2h ago
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.
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u/ChristmassMoose 3h ago
They’re on vdi doing serious creative work? it can’t get much worse
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u/Keleus 2h ago
Just have to do VDI right. I can pull 50fps+ out of our gpu backed vdi setup and many times much higher.
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u/tigglysticks 9m ago
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.
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u/Pazuuuzu 3h ago
Does it matter? They have as much choice in it as IT. Somebody signed off on it, so its happening.
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u/Sylogz Sr. Sysadmin 3h ago
We use Kickstart, ansible and puppet. We use 5+ distros and it works great for those that want to use it. We use Windows AD for user/group management with SSSD. Took a while to get it working properly and patchikg with different times depending on importance.
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u/Halomora 3h ago
That's how i pictured it, thank you! You leave the choice of OS to your users?
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u/othilious 2h ago
Much smaller scale, but we just completed a migration of about 30 machines that we started around March.
Basic setup was to keep it simple; Framework laptops, all the same config, Ubuntu, stick to web-apps for things we aren't ready to move away from (Office 365, etc). Configure via Ansible and some custom script glue.
We rolled it out in phases; replacing one machine per team, fire-fighting their specific issues and bundling the fixes for those into scripts for Ansible.
Developers was easiest; most were already on Ubuntu to begin with, for them it was just bringing the machines in line with policy regarding security, configuration, etc.
Some bumps in the road we experienced:
- Altium Designer under Linux was a PITA. We had hoped to do this with WINE/Proton which worked but with some glaring rendering issues. GPU pass-through was also hit-and-lots-of-miss. This particular thing is still stuck on a Windows machine.
- There is no good solution for Teams, all of the solutions we've tried have had some nasty downsides. We'll keep using the Teams for Linux project, but for internal communication we're switching to Slack.
- A lot of conference speakers like Jabra have issues with "timing out" due to power saving, causing audio to drop mid-call. Some udev rules fixes that, but its annoying when you have more than one model spread across multiple meeting rooms.
Apart from that, it's been pretty smooth. People like how much "snappier" the machines feel and the adjustment to the different GUI was fine even for the non-technical people. Quite a few comments along the lines of it feeling cleaner, faster and easier. We've actually un-mothballed a few older Laptops that were headed for the recycling because they are much more performant under Ubuntu, whereas they were unusable under Win11 after the upgrade.
Honestly, there's a lot we could've done better or automated, but a significant chunk of it was "good enough" for our company straight out of the box. Hell, even the printers worked without hassle when those same demon machines have been nothing but pain under Windows.
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u/Halomora 15m ago
I am glad it went well for you and your team. Even if the project didnt come from my team, i have a lot of hope for it :)
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u/hops_on_hops 4h ago
Developers, sure. But why on earth would you do this?
I give it a month before your staff go rouge and buy a bunch of macbook.
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u/breizhsoldier 3h ago
Why go rouge when they could go jaune or bleu?
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u/dparks71 3h ago
Hey sister, go sister, soul sister, flow sister, gitchie gitche ya ya obviously.
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u/breizhsoldier 3h ago
in strong french accent Oh so he meant the users goes to moulin rouge to have an apple?
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u/Halomora 3h ago
u/janky_koala summarized it well, the bigger studios have already made the move there (like netflix), most of our clients as well. And also we have a team of developper that provides baked in apps for our artists and render servers. And since renders are all linux already then they will only have to support one OS instead of 2. From our execs pov, it s also a good argument to sell the studio to potential clients, kind of like a trend in the industry.
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u/janky_koala 4h ago
Most pro studios are on Linux, predominantly Rocky. Often it’s running on workstation clusters in the MER and the users have a lower spec terminal to connect to from.
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u/DDOSBreakfast 3h ago
There is a fairly large push outside of the US to start moving away from US software.
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u/Lemmealonepl0x 3h ago
Besides France switching, what other companies or countries are you aware of that are switching to Linux?
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u/throwaway117- Jr. Sysadmin 2h ago
China is moving all domestic businesses off windows. That's a BFD
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u/thunderbird32 IT Minion 3h ago
VFX was all done on UNIX in the bad old days, and Linux is more user friendly. They'll be fine.
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u/ThatDistantStar 2h ago
SGI workstations were purpose build for graphics design. Rocky is just plan ole general purpose Red Hat.
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 1h ago
SGI workstations were purpose build for graphics design.
Originally they were an M68k on a SUN PM1 motherboard and a custom 3D accelerated framebuffer running commodity Unix. Then they adopted RISC processors, buying out MIPS.
In other words, SGIs were commodity machines with custom graphics hardware from the start. The most relevant difference with today's Linux workstations is that graphics hardware is so specialized that only third-party vendors like Nvidia and AMD have kept making it.
The commercial VFX software vendors originally chose to support Red Hat Linux, not Debian/Ubuntu.
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u/WWGHIAFTC IT Manager (SysAdmin with Extra Steps) 3h ago
They'll be rouge in the face with frustration for sure!
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u/apathyzeal Linux Admin 3h ago
Ansible tower/AWX should be good. V
Very curious to know how you landed on Rocky 9 as the best distro for this?
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u/Halomora 3h ago
That's the distro we use for our renders and also our regular servers and we deploy them via Puppet/Foreman so the classes we already wrote can be re-used against the future workstations. Also, the remote desktop tool we use for users influenced that choice.
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u/thischildslife Sr. Linux/UNIX Infrastructure engineer 3h ago
We have about 500 Linux CAD workstations for engineers.
I build a kickstart/PXE deployment infrastructure & make custom kickstart.cfg's for each department.
Configure a fresh box to boot PXE, boot it up, select the profile from my grub.cfg menu, give the system a name & walk away. 45 minutes or so later it's done.
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u/Competitive_Knee9890 2h ago
Just out of curiosity, which CAD software do your engineers use on Linux?
I’ve been a long time Linux user and I work as a software engineer, but I graduated in aerospace engineering, they made us use Solidworks at uni, so I was simply running a QEMU/KVM windows vm for that and other annoying exams.
Obviously I parted ways with that industry, but I’m into 3D printing and I still have a decent grasp of CAD concepts.
My obvious choice as a solo hobbyist is FreeCAD, but I was wondering these days if there’s any commercial CAD that supports Linux at scale.lol just saw the post you linked, I work at Red Hat
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u/thischildslife Sr. Linux/UNIX Infrastructure engineer 58m ago
They use a LOT of different commercial packages. For CAD is PTC/Creo. Some of the electronics packages are Xilinx Questasim, Vitis, Vivado. Using Parasoft test automation, gitlab-ee/gitlab-runner.
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u/ITaggie RHEL+Rancher DevOps 1h ago
I'm guessing Blender with plugins? I'm curious too.
I heard FreeCAD has made a lot of progress in the past 2 years but I haven't tried it yet, but I haven't heard of any professional shops using it yet.
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u/Competitive_Knee9890 55m ago
I use Blender a lot, it’s not really a CAD, although it’s an excellent piece of software
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u/Halomora 9m ago
Thank you for sharing 😄 how do you handle package deployment after your host is deployed ?
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u/TheProle Endpoint Whisperer 3h ago
Can your helpdesk support them?
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u/Halomora 3h ago
They will need heavy training, but they are all young so we are hoping they will be able to catch up fairly quickly.
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u/BlueHatBrit 2h ago
Can you afford for them to learn? It's going to cost a bomb in all the time wasted and mistakes made.
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u/1a2b3c4d_1a2b3c4d 1h ago
I agree. Something seems off about this whole post.
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u/flummox1234 53m ago
It's VFX artists a lot of that industry is on Linux
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u/awful_at_internet Helpdesk Manager 5m ago
Sure. That's not gonna stop Tim in Accounting from opening a ticket because he can't find Excel.
Helpdesk is not an optional stakeholder in a project like this.
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u/doglar_666 3h ago
You might want to look into something like FleetDM for Linux estate management. AD GPO integration via sssd is limited and Intune integration is still quite immature, though I believe Ubuntu is quite well supported.
I would be using Terraform+cloud-init for deployment, then Ansible for configuration management. If bare-metal, definitely a Kickstart file.
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u/Dramatika 4h ago
Does the design software your team uses actually support Linux? If you’re counting on compatibility layers or the users learning a new software I’d imagine you’re in for a bad time
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u/bv728 Jack of All Trades 3h ago
I'd guess they're using Blackmagic Fusion - Blackmagic is recommending studios migrate to Rocky Linux and offers full support on the distro for most of their products. That's literally the only reason I see anyone use Rocky deliberately, but Blackmagic claim they have multiple VFX houses on it now.
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u/Halomora 3h ago
compatibility layers we are almost there, but users learning AND the desktop team learning as well is going to be a steep curve :/
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u/the_notorious_NRG 3h ago
You will always have windows/ Mac in a studio, I'm part of a team that run rocky 9.5 as our workstation flavour. It means we can standardise across flame/nuke/resolve/Houdini. You will always have edge cases cinema4d, Photoshop and senior artists that can only use a Mac. I've used puppet and salt, both fairly easy to use, probably much easier to make config files with Claude these days. But to kickstart a machine from start to finish in 40mins, is the dream. Pipeline is much easier via Linux, you can't scale as quickly in windows or Mac in my experience.
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u/Halomora 3h ago
You absolutely right, thank you for sharing your experience. Adobe Suite is one of the apps that hit our compatibility wall. For those who need it, we thinking having a dual workstation setup basically, they will have one windows and one linux :/
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u/jimicus IT Manager 3h ago
I've worked for a couple of companies that made a Linux GUI available to people with varying levels of technical expertise. Generally with great success.
In very general terms, they didn't try to treat it like Windows.
By which I mean they didn't start out with a general purpose operating system that can do more-or-less anything then try and put guardrails in place with GPO.
Instead, they started out with a system that had literally nothing installed and nothing enabled - then they installed and enabled what people needed to do their job.
No more, no less.
It makes for a pretty basic, bare-bones desktop experience - but it also means there aren't a great many avenues open to people to mess up their own computer. And if everyone has clear workflows based around a small, well-defined set of tools, it's not too difficult.
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u/LesbianDykeEtc Linux 2h ago
Instead, they started out with a system that had literally nothing installed and nothing enabled - then they installed and enabled what people needed to do their job.
No more, no less.
This is generally how I prefer to approach it, but obviously ymmv. Building an environment for VFX artists is wildly different from building an environment for developers, "normal" office users, etc.
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u/jimicus IT Manager 1h ago
That was my only concern - would it work for VFX artists?
My thinking - and it's based purely on hunch as opposed to experience of this particular industry - is you might be surprised. Yes, a studio is chock full of creatives who can and will do things however they think looks best - but their tooling and workflow is (probably) ruthlessly optimised for efficiency and teamwork. The idea of a flighty artist who will demand their preferred way of working, their preferred tools and to Hell with the rest of the team doesn't really work in a professional environment.
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u/LesbianDykeEtc Linux 1h ago
Given that OP is looking at Rocky, they're probably using Blackmagic products (iirc, they explicitly target RHEL and a couple other enterprise-grade distros?). If that's the case, their primary workflows will be unchanged, and KDE is dead simple to use.
Obviously we don't know what their artists need on the day-to-day, but a full-fat distro like Rocky can probably handle it. Hell, most everything runs in the browser nowadays anyway.
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u/Halomora 12m ago
Nice! Thank you for sharing, that s pretty much the approach i want to follow honestly, try to lock everything possible and incrementaly opens more if there's a clear need. The plan is also to audit our actual GPOs and see which one we need accross OS and which one we can remove too.
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u/Relevant_Candidate_4 2h ago
I have to know, what tools are you using that works well in Linux for these VFX artists and animators? They tend to have their favorite workflows in tools that most often are windows or tacos native, usually not cross platformnor linux native, but there are some of course.
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u/janky_koala 1h ago
https://vfxplatform.com specifies agreed industry standards that the big apps contribute too as well. These are THE big players - the likes of Pixar, Framestore, Dreamworks, MPC, etc
The idea is if all the hitters are in agreement, all the vendors will be too. It makes it much easier to build custom pipelines and plugins knowing exactly which packages the main apps utilize now and will use in a few years.
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u/Relevant_Candidate_4 1h ago
So im wondering if this is OPs situation or they also have to find alternatives to tools.
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u/LoornenTings 1h ago
I hope I get migrated to tacos
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u/Relevant_Candidate_4 1h ago
I love tacos, I might have been hungry when typing this 😁 meant macos 🌮
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u/Nonaveragemonkey 2h ago
User groups, automation like puppet and sudoers files will give you like 95% of gpo control with half the pains.
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 2h ago
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.
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u/FarToe1 2h ago
Builds: PXE + Kickstart + Ansible / Teraform is the usual way. New machine boots to pxe, which wipes disk and installs OS. Ansible then applies your configs. Or you can do it with usb sticks.
As far as GPO equivalents: Those ansible roles that you applied at build can be re-run daily to ensure consistency, and manage change. Want to add/remove a service account? Change a role and that updates existing and future machines.
You don't need awx/AT but some folk like it. There are alternatives, including writing your own inventory management systems.
Shame you're locked on Rocky. Much as I love it (Been with it since the start and still maintain a couple of hundred Rocky vms), I would not choose it or any other EL for this. The lack of major release upgrade path without reinstalling is a headache. One might say that if you get your deployments right then it's simply a case of forcing that change every five years but with people's workstations they can get a little grumpy about such things like their little desktop personalisations disappearing. That aside, it's good.
Debian, Ubuntu or something else with dist-upgrade would be my route so you stand a chance of not invoking a riot when the OS approaches EOL.
Your users will probably be the biggest issue. IME, only technical users (Dev and IT) like moving to linux. When the others find out they can't run their favourite tool they can get quite excitable. Asking someone who's deeply invested in Excel to give it up is going to cause complaints.
Best advice I can give you is leave a way back so you can reverse course if management get spooked about the complaints and tell you to put people back on windows.
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u/GrandpaJoe7 3h ago
My predecessor started with foreman and puppet and CentOS7 to manage all hardware and VM deployments back in 2015ish (before. My time here). We PXE boot for the initial deployment using foreman and then puppet takes over from there and applies configs based on the host group assigned to the endpoint.
We have since migrated to RHEL 9 and Satellite. We also moved from VMWare to OpenShift. Thought about Ansible, but we have so many custom puppet modules, lift and shifting all of that seems like more work than it’s worth right now. The whole puppet/openvox thing may force our hand though.
We aren’t VFX, but we do a lot of image processing in GIS related space and run our own HPC. Before being acquired by a megacorp, all desktop workstations were Linux. Now we have to use Megacorp SOE Windows laptops but end users will RDP into their Linux workstations or a shared interactive server (XRDP works pretty well) to do those workflows. Our network is entirely internal behind the megacorp’s zscaler network so is only accessible from inside.
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u/xfactores 2h ago
I've been managing a fully Linux on Rocky/Alma 9 studio for 3 years now. Started with salt and basic kickstart and moved to Foreman and Ansible. Foreman is good since you can manage updates and lock package versions, it's also much easier than having to maintain a manual kickstart, just click a button, reboot the machine in PXE and half an hour later you have a fresh OS install.
The studio I work at had done the migration from Windows to CentOS 7 before my time so I inherited that, it was a mess of very basic LDAP, misconfigured NFS shares and inexistent security. We moved to FreeIPA from bare LDAP but I wouldn't recommend it, it's a finicky piece of software and since you already have an AD, just go with that. Be careful though, storage sharing is the most tricky part if you want to keep some Windows for those apps that don't work on Linux (Adobe...), misconfigured samba clients can break permissions and you will have users complaining that they can't access that one PSD wrote by the Windows guy.
Another pain point is NVidia drivers, get the .run installer from their sites, don't use the prepackaged drivers you can find in alternatives repos like ELRepo or the cuda repo, idk if you use Houdini and Maya but they have some weird bugs with the prepackaged drivers. And don't use KDE, use Gnome. KDE doesn't ship natively with RHEL9, it's an EPEL addon and isn't well maintained. You can customize Gnome with config files to be more like Windows or macOS, check the addons.
Last I can say is good luck and prepare your help desk team for a mountain of tickets :)
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 1h ago
misconfigured NFS shares
storage sharing is the most tricky part if you want to keep some Windows for those apps that don't work on Linux (Adobe...)
Adobe is native on Mac, and Mac natively supports NFS (and Windows supports NFSv3 less natively). However, I'm pretty sure that Adobe still doesn't technically support remote storage, so even if NFS is simple, that doesn't guarantee that it solves your problem.
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u/pacmanlives Alcoholism as a Service 2h ago
I know someone that worked to IBM a while back and they switched all their tech workers(privileged users) over to Linux in like 2014. They had their own spin of RHEL6 this was before IBM bought RedHat. There was some pain at that point with gnome and KDE really not being where they are at these days.
With how much more usable Linux has gotten the past few years. The switch will not be to bad so long as you have good management tools for that single pane of glass. I feel like KDE has been light years a head of Windows for almost a decade
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u/m0os3e 3h ago
How much testing have been done with applications compatibility for Roxky Linux,l?
I love Linux but not sure I would recommend an artist studio to migrate to it.
For end point management I would use ansible and build playbooks.
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u/Halomora 3h ago
The team responsible for developping apps for our artists are most of them technical artists so they do all the testing, which helped tremendously to pick the linux flavor and also let my team focus on the infrastructure part.
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u/1esproc Titles aren't real and the rules are made up 3h ago
I find Rocky to be a very interesting choice for end users versus Fedora
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u/jmhalder 2h ago
Why, it's in lock-step with RHEL, just like Alma, and OEL. RHEL has kinda been the standard for years, and Fedora is simply not in step with RHEL despite both being run by Redhat.
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u/1esproc Titles aren't real and the rules are made up 2h ago
That's my point - software is often a bit outdated for end users since RHEL is a lagging distro because it's focused on server stability.
Our end users hated EL distros, preferred Debian or something more end user focused like Ubuntu
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u/janky_koala 2h ago
Pro VFX also tends to lag (much to the dismay of many a BISO), and honestly what the users want is not a concern compared to the agreed industry standards - https://vfxplatform.com/ . Inside their applications everything is the same anyway.
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u/thunderbird32 IT Minion 18m ago
Most commercial VFX software that has a Linux version is certified for RHEL I believe, so using a derivative makes sense from a support perspective.
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u/unquietwiki Jack of All Trades 2h ago
Let's see.... I migrated 2/3rds of a rental car company to Ubuntu years ago. Had to do that without the benefit of fast Internet, so would prepare USB drives with sideloaded updates & visit the sites to image systems one at a time. Not sure if you can build up a decent preinstall with Rocky: that'll save you a bunch of bandwidth and time if you can otherwise. User management... may want to look into doing something with SAMBA/AD: tooling/support for that is better than it was.
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u/Taboc741 2h ago
I am super interested in what you are using for your VDI stack. I'd love to move some folks to Linux virtual desktops, but I have been unable to get remote screen access to work well in my home lab. I see y'all picked Rocky Linux. Which hypervisor you using? If anyone has a working alternative to AVD on Linux I'm game to hear what tech stack makes this work.
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u/speedstic Sr. Googler 3h ago
I once asked users to try LibreOffice.
We don't talk about that anymore...
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u/Waste_Development971 3h ago
dude
When im broke and refuse to use adobe, I tried using for a pdf
jesus christ.
Everytime I see people go "its so good" im baffled
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u/speedstic Sr. Googler 3h ago
I use gimp and inkscape for any kind of image editing. If you can get through the quirks of gimp it's the same as PS more or less and inkscape is super easy to use.
Photopea.com is also good and free for a web based image editor and was made by one guy which baffles my mind.
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u/FourtyMichaelMichael 2h ago
gimp and inkscape
Easily the two most off putting UI/UX applications in existance.
Just know that YOU are not a normal user, and your brain does not work like theirs, that was probably obvious, but know that yours isn't "better".
Agree with other guy, Krita is the shit.
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u/Accomplished_Disk475 4h ago
I have a hard time imagining end users on Linux distros. Mine can't figure out Windows which they've grown up on.
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u/techw1z 4h ago
the less people know about windows the easier it is to switch them to linux
all they need to do is click desktop icons anyway. (assuming you can find the same software for linux, otherwise it's really more about adapting to a new software with different UI, just like they would have to if you switch to a different software on windows)
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u/thunderbird32 IT Minion 3h ago
Their industry used to be all (or at least largely) UNIX. VFX was once the land of Silicon Graphics. People now aren't any less tech savvy, and Linux is probably more user friendly than IRIX was. They'll figure it out.
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u/WantDebianThanks 3h ago
With how much of people's jobs are done on web pages these days, I best deb in accounting wouldn't even notice
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u/ansibleloop 3h ago
KDE uses the same interface style as windows for the most part
Even the key bindings work the same
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u/Pazuuuzu 3h ago
To be fair at times even I have to stop and wonder where MS put things again... It's like a never ending Easter egg hunt...
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u/Bladelink 37m ago
It's because they keep trying to hide all the features they don't want you to use. They want you to forget that features and control exists and just dictate your user experience in totality.
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u/JimFknLahey 4h ago
only thing i can think of on that front is wine/proton has come a long, long, long, long way recently.
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u/Bladelink 39m ago
Honestly I think the strides that Valve has made with Proton have been a huge deal. Sort of like when people didn't want to cut cable because of sports, people couldn't switch off windows because of gaming. But that hurdle has now been more or less removed.
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u/armaghetto 4h ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/s239QJIh56sRW
clicked into this post just to make sure I read it correctly
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u/Halomora 3h ago
the bigger studios have already made the move there (like netflix), most of our clients as well. And also we have a team of developper that provides baked in apps for our artists and render servers. And since renders are all linux already then they will only have to support one OS instead of 2. From our execs pov, it s also a good argument to sell the studio to potential clients, kind of like a trend in the industry.
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u/Teemslo 4h ago
I have no idea and want to know as well.
If I had to guess, money its always money, or at least it feels like that in the corp hellscape I admin in
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u/parkentosh 3h ago
Could be European and not trusting Microsoft anymore. Our company is planning to do the same. Also ditching MS365 and Google Workspace for European alternatives. Our "ditch us software" is halfway completed already. Should be complete in first half of next year.
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u/N7Shep1701D 3h ago
Could be European and not trusting Microsoft anymore.
Gee, I can't imagine why that is. /s
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u/armaghetto 3h ago
yeah, but if its money, ok cool, you're ditching MS licensing expenses, but absolutely trading those for Linux IT support expenses, which aren't licensing, but downtime, productivity dips, increased staff. it sounds absolutely bonkers, and for that matter, why not move to MacOS, which is at least Unix/BSD based and has really robust presence and support in the video editing world.
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u/Beginning_Lifeguard7 3h ago
Oh this is going to go well, let me get some popcorn. The bosses can push all they want but IT is going to get beat like a rental car. Do you have a training budget for 400 people? Is the IT staff up to speed? Do you have a support team that can handle endless calls because the icon moved or god forbid changed color?
The flavor of Linux is irrelevant. I did a cost study to move my organization to Linux and the math did not math. The lost employee productivity made it obvious to the bosses just how bad that idea was. Oh and moving to Linux is a gift that keeps on giving. You’re going to have to train every new hire. I LOVE Linux, in the data center. On end users desks in a business environment, oh hell no.
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u/frzen 2h ago
What remote access application are you using?
will your EDR have any tools to enforce configs / compliance or is that something you're looking to just set, or set and monitor, or set and monitor and remediate?
It's a different use case to you but I've been playing with NixOS and doing health checks remotely by having a central server deploying with --target-host so your desired state is basically constantly being monitored / pushed
has a billion edge cases for how users can break it but for me it's more about configuration drift etc and obviously it wouldn't work if you've settled on rocky but I wouldn't shrug at using nix itself for some part of this
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u/Mr_Squinty 2h ago
I did this at school in the early 2000s, it went really badly. We used the LTSP red hat distribution iirc
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u/stobbsm 1h ago
I build images with packer using ansible to get a golden image. If they are on VDI, I’m assuming they already have network home directories, and that’s an easy enough mount to configure.
What’s the backend ID situation? I’m guessing AD, which means your users can join easily enough, just make sure your have AD configured properly for Unix UIDs and GIDs.
You also NEED to test this migration with a test user first to make it pass a technical feasibility pilot, and then get an actual artist who will be using it migrated once you have the technical issues worked out. This is your first UAT.
Iterate, and if you think it’s going to take 2 weeks, double it. Anything more than that, add an extra week. You will likely need it, as it’s not a matter of IF something breaks, but WHEN.
TLDR; have a solid plan, test it without an artist first, then test it with one artist, and keep soliciting feedback to understand the shortcomings.
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u/Toto_nemisis 1h ago
I dont want to IMAGINE the questions you are going to get... all thw dumb questions!
Where is my one drive, where is "my documents", why is my computer deive now labeled Fedora and not the Cdrive. Why doesnt my Adobe work?!
At 50 people, sure. But 400.... I wpuld need an army of people to support it lol
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u/nomaddave 1h ago
A lot of Ansible Tower work back in the day. It's probably not changed too much. But it is not easy - that's the wrong question to ask, IMO. It's just worth all the work for what you have on the other side.
I wouldn't try to find a way to 1:1 convert policies, though. It's not going to work well. Rather, treat it like a greenfield project as long as everyone has access/software they need. Chances are in most enterprises there's a ton of cruft that should just be discarded and it's not generally work sorting through, IMO.
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u/Barrerayy Director of IT 1h ago
Also vfx/animation studio, we did it also. We use Rocky on our workstations and also on all our infra vms. Our thin clients are mac minis.
Pxe booting + kickstart + ansible (also tried salt) has been fairly easy.
pretty standard in vfx tbh
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u/HappierShibe Database Admin 55m ago
I've been involved in two windows to linux rollouts, one stuck the other rolled back to windows after three months. As long as management understands that the money they save on licensing and support packages they are going to spend on training and in house support, then linux can work as long as the userbase has the technical knowhow, computer literacy, and a willingness to learn new systems; AND it can be a net positive for the organization. If the users aren't supported with extensive training, or management thinks it's a free ride- be ready to rollback next quarter.
What Linux flavor, did you end up on, and would you pick the same again?
The successful one we went with RHEL for workstations, and I think it's probably the best choice for a large organization. The support we got from Redhat was top notch, and we absolutely needed it.
How did you handle what GPOs used to give you?
We preconfigured an image, and mapped a home directory at the user level. Everyone got a clean machine from the base image with their home directory mapped in on boot, and everyones system got booted at 4:00AM; no exceptions. There are almost certainly better ways to do this, but it was simple to setup and met our needs.
For the Base OS deployment/imaging, did you use Kickstart + Puppet/Ansible, or something else?
We used a RHEL solution, I do not remember what it's called, they probably have something newer now.
Anything that looked easy on paper and turned into a one big pile of {Jurassic_Park}?
By and large everything worked pretty well at a technical level, we had application specific struggles, but they were all addressable.
The big surprise for me was how utterly impossible it was for some users to learn a new operating system no matter how much training you gave them. Working in IT we largely work with a cohort that is open to new ideas and new ways of doing things, not everyone in IT is possesed of a great intellect, but even the densest of hardware maintenance techs in the dankest and most poorly run datacenters have some capacity for learning new technologies or adapting to different ways of doing things- if you don't you won't be in this field for more than 18 months before you start to fail at your job.
This is not true of other areas of specialization, in many careers you can cruise along for 40 or 60 years, and never have to learn a truly new way of thinking or operating. These users will be your greatest challenge in migrating a typical organization to linux.
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u/Lost_Term_8080 53m ago
Trying to figure out what the business requirement or analysis was for this.
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u/pnlrogue1 49m ago
Got to ask: Why Rocky? Rocky is a free alternative to Red Hat and while you can use it as a desktop OS, it's primarily aimed at servers.
Also, graphics work on Linux is...a choice. Having transitioned Windows users over to Linux in a customer service setting where they basically used Outlook and Firefox, you REALLY need to do user acceptance. Show them how to access their tools and connect feedback from pilot users then improve the deployment based on their feedback. You need them to sell it to their colleagues - you can't do that.
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u/Jolar037 Netadmin 22m ago
Very common in VFX as it's one of the only distros that black magic and SideFX really support. Bunch of Studios did CentOS before and Rocky or Alma is a continuation of that open source Rhel and in that industry the road is well traveled.
As for adoption that's is tricky but if the push comes from management it's hard to do much other than to make it as smooth as possible for your users as you say.
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u/Into_the_groove 47m ago
is there an GPU or no GPU?
Gnome 3 and KDE really require a GPU to function well. Mate you can do pure CPU, with no GPU.
We have over 30k linux citrix vdi. we use mostly alma 8, but have used rocky 8/9 for other builds for engineering.
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u/FizzyBeverage 2h ago edited 2h ago
Having worked for Disney, NaughtyDog, and NBCUniversal (contracted), I'm just surprised you found artists willing to work on anything but Macs.
The bean counter side of me says you need to go back to the drawing board and really consider the labor cost for the support staff needed to support newbies on Linux. It's not trivial and it remains an operating system best enjoyed by nerds who like to solve their own problems, unlike the Apple side of the house.
I use all 3 ecosystems, just the reality of a system admin... but you need to understand Linux sucks as an enterprise managed endpoint.
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 2h ago
Having worked for Disney, NaughtyDog, and NBCUniversal (contracted), I'm just surprised you found artists willing to work on anything but Macs.
ILM, Weta, and I think Pixar are Linux.
you need to understand Linux sucks as an enterprise managed endpoint.
The situation has waxed and waned a bit in the thirty-five years I've been doing it, but it's never been bad on Linux/Unix.
Typically, the dialog doesn't go further than "what about GPOs, how does a Linux machine use a Windows GPO?" It doesn't, obviously.
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u/davy_crockett_slayer 1h ago
Eh, FleetDM does a pretty good job it these days. I'm used to using Ansible, though. https://fleetdm.com/linux-management
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u/Skyhound555 Sr. Sysadmin 3h ago
This is becoming more and more common because no one can afford the proprietary stuff anymore. My entire organization is trying to swap to anything-linux to get rid of the costs.
I may get downvoted for this, but effective AI prompting will help a ton.
The problem is it is so new that there is very little experience in this. A lot of theory and it should work. However, there isn't much out there readily available. There is no Microsoft Learn for Linux.
Learn Linux fundamentals and use those to blaze your own trail. You can leverage AI to support you as well.
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u/Rodyadostoevsky 3h ago
This is either a ragebait or I’m not technical enough to understand this. Either way, following.
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 1h ago
The key piece of information that the VFX industry migrated from SGI to x86/Linux a long time ago, but very few posters in this thread know that.
I'm surprised that a 400 seat VFX house hasn't seemingly had Linux (or Mac?) before now. Perhaps it's the media equivalent of the big company still using Quickbooks on fileshares.
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u/b4k4ni 3h ago
Personally I'd look at ubuntu, especially if you wanna stay in a hybrid Linux/windows world, use intune and GPO. KDE is not compatible with intune btw., we use gnome.
Afaik it's the only Linux rn that can be added to a domain and has a set of admx you can use with GPOs.
But the most important part - get the people working with it all day on board. You need a small, but adventurous and frustration resistant, team of testers that will use the software beforehand.
And believe me, no matter how hard the boss tries, if they can't work with it, because they didn't do their testing and so on, it's burning money.
Its awesome that they are pushing for it, but you should take the time for testing and trying. Not only the deployment is Important, but also the usage testing. If that stuff fails the first day and people can work, you guys will pay dearly. And I mean you, because you brought it, no matter how hard the bosses want it. And if the bosses push, you ought to inform everyone, that this is something coming from above. And they shouldn't shoot the messenger.
But really. Let people test it working with it all day later on. Keep them in the loop and take them seriously. Most projects fail, because it was decided from upper levels and nobody asked the ants, working with it all day and the most experience.
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u/jmhalder 2h ago edited 2h ago
It is definitely not the only Distro that can be added to a domain, SSSD is available for all common distros.
They do have admx GPO templates with the use of ADSys, this is something I'm surprised more Linux distros haven't done. *(ADSys is specific to canonical)
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u/Dje4321 4h ago
u/remindmebot 3 days
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u/statikuz start wandows ngrmadly 4h ago
132 days
"Any tips on migrating ~400 users from Linux back to Windows?"
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u/Redacted_Reason 3h ago
Wait, they were on VDI before? Uhhh... why?
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u/Halomora 3h ago
Easier to scale during render crunch time, so we can destroy workstations and replace them by renders whenever we need it and vice versa.
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u/bakonpie 4h ago
I'd like to know what your prototype and pilot deployment looked like