It depends on the market. I have been designing semiconductors since 1997. All of the EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tools from Cadence, Synopsys, Mentor,

It depends on the market. I have been designing semiconductors since 1997. All of the EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tools from Cadence, Synopsys, Mentor, and others are written for Unix/X11. Back then everyone had a Sun SPARC or HP PA-RISC on their desk. A few had an IBM RS/6000 or maybe a DEC Alpha. In the server room we had some Sun Enterprise E4000 class machines with 12 CPUs and 16GB RAM. We started using Linux on the desktop as X terminals to the Suns in the closet and got rid of most of our Sun desktops. From around 2002-2012 all of the EDA vendors ported their tools to Linux and we ran them straight on our Linux desktops. For multiple simulation runs we would send those jobs to the server cluster machines through LSF. Since around 2013 the 3 companies I have worked for have used virtual desktop sessions using NX or X2Go running on the remote servers. All of the remote servers run Linux with a GNOME/KDE/XFCE desktop. Then we run the client on whatever machine and OS you want. Disconnect your session at work, go home, reconnect, and you have the exact desktop with everything open just as you left it.