In addition to the other responses, the VFX community has strong roots coming in the SGI/IRIX days. When those platforms started to decline due to competition f

In addition to the other responses, the VFX community has strong roots coming in the SGI/IRIX days. When those platforms started to decline due to competition from modern commodity hardware among other reasons, Linux offered the best path of migration from both a hardware support perspective and reasonable compatibility with existing pipelines and tools (the latter being very important). Red Hat became a sort of de facto at that point. ^ This is what I have been told by my older colleagues; I wasn’t around for this. My current employer danced around with RHL and Fedora Core before moving to CentOS 6 (now 7, and looking at what to do with 8). Pretty much all studios using Linux in this industry are running RHEL/CentOS, with a very small handful operating on Ubuntu. Home users will do whatever they want and deal with whatever incompatibilities arise ;)