Description#

I wanted to start learning Maya, and was really surprised that in its most recent versions it is virtually impossible to install in Linux. The documentation is awfully outdated, it only works on very specific versions of some distros, and even then, the process is confusing and very error prone.

The closest thing I could find to a working install was this GitHub project, which only worked for Maya version 2024.2.

My Work#

Using the project I found, I worked out how to make a Docker container that can execute Maya 2026.3 on Linux, independent of distro and without polluting your system with dozens of packages and always-running processes. Once I managed to make it work, I contributed the new files upstream, and they were incorporated into the original project :)

What I Learnt#

• How to run graphical applications inside Docker containers (surprisingly, I had not done that yet, they always have web interfaces)
• How Maya works at the program level, its dependencies, the inner workings of the licensing program, etc.
• Some basic Maya, once it was installed