which big company use centos destop in daily work?

Comments, suggestions, compliments, etc
rkoppelh
Posts: 25
Joined: 2015/01/27 03:13:14
Location: Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Re: which big company use centos destop in daily work?

Post by rkoppelh » 2017/07/11 20:37:23

Hi
Never said anything re developers desktop or new bleeding edge. We're running standard enterprise software requiring stability and reliability when rendering 24/7 or undertaking complex animation. Software exists - nothing to develop. A typical enterprise situation. So highly recommend Centos 7 for this, a perfect workstation environment.

For development - well Fedora or Debian etc for Linux and Win 8.1/10 and agree Centos not suited for bleeding edge development but then again would business / enterprise buy such software? Probably they'd wait for Centos 8.

Przemas
Posts: 58
Joined: 2015/07/22 11:32:28

Re: which big company use centos destop in daily work?

Post by Przemas » 2017/08/31 08:09:56

Centos on desktop can be a pain - but also rewarding.
On a downside - package availability is often a problem. Which means in those cases you'll have to learn howto grab the sources and compile stuff yourself. Also some of the libraries in Centos are a bit old so often you'll have problems compiling / running newer apps (for example - forget about newer Blender). Sadly until more projects start providing Appimages or better solution emerges there's no indication it will change anytime soon (and, yeah, at this point I'm counting Flatpak out - while it may be cool for development environment, for regular, daily desktop use it is still fairly bad - mostly because of its "star", sanboxing "feature" - fe imagine graphic editor where you can't save your work as you can't access regular filesystem).

On an upside - once you get it running it is rock solid, snappy and fun to use. Also if you're after VFX / CGI apps (Maya, Modo, Houdini, Fusion, Nuke etc) you can expect good out of the box experience without tinkering with symlinks and other annoyances.

I've been using Centos 7 as my main desktop for well over a year and am quite a happy camper. Initially it was because Blackmagic apps (Fusion and Resolve) were giving me trouble on other distros as soon as I installed Nvidia driver (which is a must), but now I'm not really looking to move.
I only regret there are still some glaring holes in apps availability on Linux in general. For me the most painful is lack of general purpose, industrial design grade CAD apps (like Rhino / Solidworks / Fusion 360). Also video apps were a chore (unless you went for compositing and had a budget for Nuke) - but at least this slowly changes thx to Blackmagic. Once they solve audio without getting a Decklink card (or allow audio on the usb Shuttle) my needs in this respect will be covered (Lightworks is an ok choice too) and only CAD will be left.

Answering to the original question - you'll easily find Centos in VFX houses :) .

rkoppelh
Posts: 25
Joined: 2015/01/27 03:13:14
Location: Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Re: which big company use centos destop in daily work?

Post by rkoppelh » 2017/09/01 22:54:49

Re packager availability on Centos,
while it's true that packages may not be available because they have not been compiled for centos (particularly at the early stage of Centos 7 life cycle), this is not such a big deal because its easily fixed in many cases. Simply look up the rpm packages for fedora 22-24 that are of interest, obtain the fedora 22-24 spec and convert to Centos 7 spec. Much is automated and that that needs manual edit is usually easily fixed. You can run into problems that latest dependency packages are not available, but you can do again the same for these if you are keen enough for the original package. However, yes the work load and complexity increases if the latest dependencies are needed. But it CAN BE DONE!

You can also do local install into /opt and also use the SCL facilities and repositories that override older versions of packages.

Even more interestingly though you can now virtualize using latest 3D enabled drivers via mediated device drivers ,mdv, libvirt libraries, enhanced by Nivida, allows use of Nvidia drivers in virtualization, gives mediated sharing of GPU between Linux and guest OS of a single card, and so enables on guest windows use of professional adobe Pr/Ae or Avide Media Composer. 1st version only released earlier this year, so expect issues and bugs but the technology is here and will get better. Nvidia has noticed the demand for this. We haven't use this yet but intent to experiment with this technology soon.

Given our experiments have shown rendering is persistently 30% faster under linux for same professional VFX software under windows or Linux, no wonder the CGI/VFX world is shifting to Linux. That is the economic driver, not same ideology re windows or linux, just stability and speed. 30% in the movie industry represents a lot of time and money saving.

Mike_Rochefort
Posts: 215
Joined: 2016/03/16 02:34:19

Re: which big company use centos destop in daily work?

Post by Mike_Rochefort » 2017/09/19 03:47:47

For the sake of not sounding repetitive, I will second what Przemas and RKoppelh have said. A large majority of the medium to large VFX/Film houses use CentOS and RHEL mixed about for workstations and servers. If you check out the VFX Reference Platform, the standard is pretty much built around this. But it does also use packages of which are later versions than those in the standard repositories. Easily solvable through SCL and IUS, mixed with some self-compiling ;)

I use CentOS as my daily driver, and with the 7.4 release the standard desktop experience has gotten so much better (thank you for GNOME 3.22). Once GPU pass through to virtualized guest OS's is ironed out and simple to accomplish, I'm going to obliterate my Windows dual boot. I'll have no reason to keep it around at that point.

My toolset: Maya, Modo, Houdini, Blender, Mari, Substance Painter, Nuke, Fusion, RenderMan, Arnold, and Redshift. All of which (except maybe Substance) perform better on Linux (CentOS for me) than any other system. Windows is kept around solely for the instances where I need Adobe products.

To be fair with the rendering statistic, that really applies to all Unix like systems (MacOS included). Windows really is terrible for this sort of thing, and its memory/swap management is pitiful in comparison.
Solution Architect @RedHat | RHCE
Former SysAdmin @BlueSkyStudios and @Pixar
Feature animation and VFX enthusiast
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