Pixar completed a full migration from SGI Unix workstations to Linux by 2001, and by 2003 ran its entire studio on x86 hardware using Xenon processors. The driver was economics, not ideology. RISC workstations lost the price-performance war to commodity PCs, and Pixar's render farm demands grew with every production.
The critical constraint was two million lines of internal code written for a Unix environment. Porting to Windows NT was off the table. Linux offered POSIX compliance and the closest available path from IRIX, which meant the codebase survived largely intact. A botched rm command that nearly destroyed Toy Story 2 did not change that calculus.
The original video by Crierlon leaves two questions unanswered: why did CAD and CAM industries running the same SGI hardware not follow Hollywood onto Linux, and why did Pixar choose Linux over a BSD variant. Those gaps are worth reading the full piece for, because the answers explain how an entire industry standard quietly formed around one studio's infrastructure decision.
[READ ORIGINAL →]