Mac laptops have bad GPUs generally though, that's why people I know who work on games have Windows laptops most of the time, basically beefy gaming laptops. Or to be honest most of them don't even use laptops and develop on a desktop for that same reason.
For graphics I don't know, probably depends what kind of graphics you're targeting. By king I didn't imply most popular, I doubt Linux is the most popular at anything honestly. I meant that I find it still excels at development because of the way the OS and userland tools are setup. If I needed to do some graphics programming and I could get away with using Linux for it I probably would still choose it.
But for graphics, unless we're talking 2D or simple stuff, I'd imagine you'd want some beefy GPU, and that means you're buying a PC which gives you the choice of Windows or Linux.
My complaint is that Mac laptops don't let you install Linux and MacOS didn't embrace Linux with something like WSL for example either, and that holds me back, because otherwise the laptops are very enticing.
I mean, it's my personal preference, I find having a good command line and package manager to be quite nice for development personally. And I prefer the KDE UX as well. I also like Unix as a whole, even the OS configuration is just code inside files.
And I think I associate the userland to be part of the OS. So for example, instead of thinking, oh I wish Windows had a better command line and package manager and got rid of the registry and used files instead as the main abstraction, I'm much more likely to wish that Nvidia released high quality drivers for Linux and that Unity had prime support for it.
You mean as in Vulcan and games, or rendering? Linux is your best choice unless you are using some Windows first framework like Unity. (AFAIK there is no OS X first one.)
Hum... You know you don't need to program on the same platform that your game will run, right? (I still don't know what you mean by "graphics", since it's not games.)
Otherwise creating a mobile game would be pretty insane.
Anything related to GPGPU programming with sane tooling like what NVidia Insights, Instruments, PIX are capable of.
Has RenderDoc finally started to support shader debugging, with watchpoints and and everything else that one expects?
Engines like Unreal and Unity.
Visualization tools like Maya, AutoCAD, Catia, 3D Painter, OctaneRender, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator,...
CMYK and other typesetting colour workflows tooling.
Yes probably you will refer one or two of those have a Linux version with a feature subset, which is ok, I guess, when the kingdom is actually a principality.
If it is king for dev work, it should win at it across the board, regardless of what work the dev does.
Game devs are also devs.
And in VFX, UNIX was already dominant thanks SGI, not Linux.
Which tend to use it for rendering farms in most cases, while graphics oriented people stick with macOS and Windows workstations for the daily workflows.