[Utopia]

k Maya is available on Linux. Maya is considered The animation tool. It really is pretty cool. I have played with it. Lucas and Co use it (as well of some of their own proprietary stuff). Lord of the rings had many, many scenes using Maya. Info here

Of course, it all depends what you're movie is. I don't doubt it for one minute that some studios are switching platforms. Maya perfers Mac OS X. If you want a job in the industry, you'll need to be Maya/ Mac OS X savvy. It also never hurts to know other OSs as well. (Shows versatility)

[pyx]

Maya 4.5 IS available for Linux. The personal edition allows users to fully test drive the software for free as long as its not used for commercial purposes.
There are MANY graphics tool suites available for Linux. Broadcast 2000 is another example of a high end package. ALSA is an example of a driver set for Linux for very high end sound studio production software. There are other packages such as POVRAY and many rendering and animation programs available for Linux as well.

[HAL9000]

Breaking - Pixar and Exluna settle lawsuit, NVidia acquires Exluna, drops BMRT and keeps Entropy.

The plot thickens.