Not only games, movies and sci-viz rendering have little to do with UI/UX design considerations and tooling for consumer applications.

Which is why GNOME and KDE to this day, still need to try to advocate to get more UI/UX developers involved into their projects.

Really? I thought video/post-production people were mostly on Macs these days. What are the standard software stacks for doing FX?

We're getting off-topic here, but see http://www.vfxplatform.com/

RHEL/Centos is probably the most common distro used.

No, everybody is on Amiga :)