> I imagine things like render farms or other specialist graphics work
Eh... outside of the broadcast motion graphics group, small personal/business farms, or educational institutions this is largely a majority Linux area.*
*I'm speaking from the perspective of public cloud farms and the feature film industry (for VFX and Anim). You can't escape Windows for select software and plugins, but if it's not a strict requirement by the software, then it's a business choice for other reasons (i.e. existing environment, staff, etc) because you will from a technical standpoint operate at a loss using Windows.
It's the same as infrastructure and server side.. from my corner I see a limited horizon over which little exists and only a few things over there might use Windows. Think of any industry: the first for whatever reason that came to mind was architecture. Lots of firms on ArchiCAD and that'll never change, there's no reason to. The value is not the tool or the platform underlying it, or anything else an Engineer(tm) will understand, the value is all in the buildings costing 1000x more than the 'tiny windows utility' that just happens to contribute to the result, kinda like QuickBooks or calc.exe.
It's a bunch of actual people designing buildings that cost so much more than a Windows license doing Real Things that have some lingua franca interface that has no reason to go Linux and probably never will, because in that business they're too busy with actual priorities to ever even discuss how the status quo could change. There are 10,000 industries like this, and probably 10,000 people to each of those who simply don't care, because to them the computer is and will remain only a tool. That's the world of Windows we can't see.
It's different for those of us in Anim/VFX. Windows poses a serious business cost, not from licensing, software, or administration. The vast majority of images these days are still rendered with CPU engines. Windows incurs a 15-30% time increase per frame compared to using Linux or macOS. When your frames take on average an hour minimum to over 24 hours, with thousands of frames to render, that adds up significantly in terms of iteration, directorial changes, and making deadlines.
Once you get beyond small teams doing the work, this starts to play in massively. Pretty much all medium+ sized studios have their artist pipeline on Linux, reserving Windows or macOS for tools like Adobe, ZBrush or Marvelous Designer that don't have a Linux build yet. And where I'm at, the operating system itself doesn't even matter to the artists. All they need to know is "this button opens terminal, this command puts me in the right show, this command launches the hub" and from there they're in our GUI pipeline. Their environment is the DCC, not the OS. For all intents and purposes it's completely abstracted away from them.
That's not to say there aren't those that take advantage, creating custom commands and utilities to share with others. But for the most part the fact that it's not Windows or macOS doesn't bother them.
Yes. I know Windows inside and out. I can easily navigate the UI. It does the job I need it to. I don’t want to spend my time inefficiently by toiling around in a Linux console due to some strange affinity towards Linux. I have a job to do and Windows is an effective tool I know and can use to execute the job.
If you're going solo or as part of a small team it makes sense. If you have a team that can abstract that away from your so you only have to worry about your work, then whether or not you know the OS itself means nothing. We can bypass the terminal altogether if we wanted, it has nothing to do with personal wishes or desires and everything to do with maximum performance and how the industry (film/anim/vfx) evolved.
Until an update trashes your computer that is. Or you end up spending your time inefficiently by toiling around google results for some weird issue that popped up after a forced update.
Eh... outside of the broadcast motion graphics group, small personal/business farms, or educational institutions this is largely a majority Linux area.*
*I'm speaking from the perspective of public cloud farms and the feature film industry (for VFX and Anim). You can't escape Windows for select software and plugins, but if it's not a strict requirement by the software, then it's a business choice for other reasons (i.e. existing environment, staff, etc) because you will from a technical standpoint operate at a loss using Windows.