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Sorry -- my posts get munged-- I don't know why ... Start again ...

I don't think 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)

Actually, Maya has been on Linux since March '01.

http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/companyinfo/history/20012002.shtml

2001 - Maya For Linux Ships In March, Alias|Wavefront ships entire suite of Maya® 3D software products to the Red Hat™ Linux® operating system. With this new addition, Linux users will experience the power of the world’s leading effects and animation software. “We’re very excited to be able to run Maya on Linux," said Michael Babcock, Software Engineer, Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.™ "The core of our puppeteering control system technology runs on Linux and we love the stability and flexibility it provides. Now that Maya’s superb character tools are available on Linux, the Henson Digital Performance Studio is a complete, smooth production pipeline that combines powerful and elegant tools to provide the best in character performance animation."

Alias|Wavefront Ships Maya 3 for Linux

The news here is the platform used to build the render farms, the workstations are secondary. I've seen several stories on Hollywood's move to Linux and it seems that when it comes to workstations none of Linux, Windows or Mac does everything so they're using all three.