Most large studios seem to run Fedora Core as their distro of choice. Why is that?
Most likely running Red Hat as the server distro, so Fedora would be an obvious choice for the desktop system.
Who knows? Popularity?
Of course, if it were popularity, I would go with Ubuntu…
Where are you getting your info?
There was a time when Red Hat was considered to be the best Linux desktop distribution. I’d guess that it is a simple matter of people upgrading what they already have.
Look at the system requirements of the software they run. Most likely the software is only certified to run on a few specific distributions.
Most likely it would work on another distro, but if you have a problem on an unsupported distribution you’re likely out of luck if you want help from your app vendor. Looking at apps like Maya, XSI and Shake - all three have some version of Fedora Core as a supported OS.
Institutional inertia, too, maybe? Where I work, that tends to be one of the major factors. Why switch to something new when upgrading the existing one is more straightforward? We already have procedures in place for the current version of whatever is on our servers, so it’s easier to upgrade and revise a bit than to learn all the little quirks of a new distribution.
Our older/well established systems run Fedora; they used to run RHEL. On newer systems, sometimes we run Fedora, sometimes we run Ubuntu.
We’re not a 3D place, but the principle is the same.