From: Martyn Drake [mailto:martyn@drake.org.uk]
In my industry we have little choice over what distros we can use, simply because when you purchase expensive things like Maya or Pixar's Renderman, you're tied to what they support and both these products will only support Red Hat 7.2 and 7.3 at the time of writing. People have tried Debian with RenderMan only to have been told that it's not supported in any way shape or form. Of course, it's not just the industry that I work in that has this problem. I'm sure that most commercial Linux software
Not supported doesn't mean it won't work though :) The Matrix was rendered with renderman (and other bits) running on FreeBSD through the Linux compatability system. What I found with the movie industry was that people were unwilling to try things which were "unsupported" as they equated it with "not working".
Adam