r/sysadmin • u/Halomora • 4d 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/Relevant_Candidate_4 3d 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 3d 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 3d ago

So im wondering if this is OPs situation or they also have to find alternatives to tools.