When CentOS went away, the VFX world lost the dependable floor it had been standing on for a decade. The industry has spent the years since settling on what comes next.

For a huge part of it, that answer is AlmaLinux. Over the last year, the VFX industry has helped mold AlmaLinux into what it needs in a variety of ways. With native NVIDIA support, Btrfs, broader hardware support, easier migrations, and more than two million systems now checking in for updates every week (roughly double where we were a year ago), the VFX industry is finding what it needs in the AlmaLinux Community. All of it forever-free and owned by the community that uses it.

This talk opens the day with a look at where AlmaLinux is, how we got here, and what we're powering next.

Born out of direct community discussions at SIGGRAPH 2024 and 2025, the AlmaLinux Media & Entertainment (M&E) Special Interest Group (SIG) was spun off with a clear mission: to address the unique, high-performance demands of creative pipelines, from heavy render nodes to artist workstations.

A lot has happened since our initial foundations. In this session, we are diving straight into the concrete tools, testing, and future-proofing we’ve been building over the last year.

We will explore our recent engineering efforts, including comprehensive testing against AlmaLinux 10 with KDE Plasma and tackling the industry's next major operational frontiers: Wayland support and remote desktop solutions. Furthermore, we’ll showcase how we are actively lowering the barrier to entry with a brand-new, Qt-based GUI application designed to seamlessly kickstart freelancers and students into the Linux VFX ecosystem. Join us to see how the M&E SIG is translating SIGGRAPH community feedback into production-ready open-source infrastructure.

What Attendees Will Learn (Key Takeaways)

Origins & Purpose: Why the M&E SIG was spun off following SIGGRAPH 2024 and 2025 to bridge the gap between enterprise Linux and the rigid demands of studio pipelines.

The Tech Stack of Tomorrow: An inside look at our testing and development tracking toward AlmaLinux 10, KDE Plasma, and solving the Wayland + remote desktop equation for color-accurate, low-latency artist workflows.

Lowering the Friction: A showcase of our new Qt-based desktop GUI built specifically to onboard students and freelance artists onto Linux without the terminal dread.

The Roadmap & Collaboration: How studios can leverage these community-driven tools today, and how to get involved in the SIG's future initiatives.

Introducing the AlmaLinux Creative Installer, an open source tool from the AlmaLinux Media & Entertainment SIG that bootstraps a creative workstation with curated tools and desktop tweaks. Bring questions on usage, contributing, the Qt migration, packaging/COPR, or supported OS/DE combos.

Just because a product says it supports Linux doesn’t mean you get all the features they brag about. Many of those are only on Windows. So let’s talk about what your EDR can and can’t do on your Linux workstations.

Linux now stands as the most widely used operating system for production and development environments, as it provides a lot of services (daemons) and tools for debugging.

One core part are the log files which is widely used. You can use built-in commands such as less, grep, awk/sed or tail for log analysis, but there are times when you need some more advanced commands or tools that can help to investigate large log files efficiently.

In this talk, you will learn five practical tips to view your log files for analysis. You will learn about Open Source tools that can make your job easier for your daily tasks.

Join us to learn more about Linux, log analysis, aggregation tools, and the value of Open Source Community.

This session introduces the Academy Software Foundation's recently launched Wayland for Artists Working Group.

The graphical desktop on Linux workstations in animation and VFX facilities has long relied on the X Windows System (X11) protocol. Wayland is a long running effort to replace X11 with a more modern protocol architecture. The Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) have been removed from Enterprise Linux 10 and subsequent releases.

The full impact of this transition on high-end content creation applications (commercial, open source and in-house) and workflows used in animation and VFX as well as remote access solutions is still not well understood in our industry.

This new Working Group now provides a forum to convene the community to ensure the long-term viability of Linux as the premier platform for professional VFX and animation artists.

The AlmaLinux M&E edition provides an integrated experience leveraging AlmaLinux OS 10 with KDE Plasma along with a selection of open source media creation tools. But for studios looking to leverage AlmaLinux M&E in their environments, producing tailored experiences matching their software and hardware requirements is a must.

This workshop aims to showcase how to derive from the official deliverable to produce tailored versions optimized for your requirements to make mass deployment as smooth as possible.

The way we build Linux workstations is fundamentally evolving, and the industry's reliance on legacy display layers is drawing to a close. As studios transition toward a modern desktop future, infrastructure teams face a singular challenge: maintaining the high-performance, enterprise-grade remote protocols that our pipelines demand.

In this technical demonstration, engineered in collaboration with the remote desktop experts at NI SP GmbH, we are unveiling a critical piece of that puzzle: a live preview of the Amazon DCV beta running on the next generation of the Linux desktop stack. No fluff, no deep-dive architecture theory, just a direct look at the low-latency, high-fidelity future of remote creative workflows.

If you are mapping your studio's hardware and protocol lifecycle, this is the session you can't afford to miss.

For a long time, the open source world ran on trust. The xz utils backdoor changed that, and the rise of AI is making the problem even harder to ignore. We are now seeing attacks where AI tools accidentally trick developers into downloading fake, malicious code instead of real libraries. In this keynote, we will examine the future direction of open source and discuss how we can better protect our infrastructures. Attendees will leave with practical steps to ensure they aren't falling behind in the quickly evolving AI landscape.

You have spent the day hearing what the AlmaLinux Media and Entertainment community is building, from the new M&E SIG and the move to AlmaLinux 10 to Wayland for artists, remote desktop, and studio-ready images. This closing session is about you. Whether you run a render farm, light shots, wrangle a pipeline, coordinate a crew, or write the docs nobody else volunteers for, there is a real role for you in this project, and almost none of them require you to be a kernel wizard.

Today's sessions were really a practical map of how to participate in the AlmaLinux project. Let benny show you at least one thing you can do before you leave the room. You don't even have to be a Jedi.