From a career in professional VFX production (albeit software engineering side) - you'd be surprised... As an example loading anything and everything, such as

From a career in professional VFX production (albeit software engineering side) - you'd be surprised... As an example loading anything and everything, such as starting Maya, is done from the shell (different projects would have a myriad of different settings - usually stored in env vars), so picking up a few Linux skills can give your average artist some serious productivity (and hence career) gains. The work is often distributed globally - wanna check the state of something a bit non-standard in another site without transferring heaps of data over? There's a nice tool for that ;)