u/TomOnABudget

After 20 years of trying to switch, I've finally passed 2 milestones:

More than 3 months with Linux as the main OS on my personal machine.
First version upgrade of a Linux distro
- Fedora 43 to 44
- That's where Mint fell on its face for me in the past.

That upgrade went how I like it, pretty much uneventful. I did have to use the command line utility to trigger the update. Although the OS then did give me a UI notification that the update was available (weird).

I'm also really impressed with how well Wine and Proton (via Steam) work. So, I've now gotten my favourite Visualiser (Milkdrop 3) to work and a few older games too.

While I did get Davinci to work, it's very slow, doesn't support drag and drop from Dolphin and can't export directly. I'm also still relying heavily on Adobe Lightroom Classic for editing photos. Hopefully those 2 issues get rectified soon so I can say goodbye to Microsoft.

Just venting a bit of frustration here as I'm doing my best in migrating to Linux. But if you try to do Photo or Video editing, while traveling, holy f*ck it's a difficult exercise.

No matter what you do, you'll end up doing it wrong.

Start with laptop choice. Nvidia, AMD or Intel iGPU?

NVidia? Isn't the driver support garbage?
Intel? Aren't the cpus <edit>I meant iGPUs and Laptops CPUs from 2018-2024</edit> just overall mediocre?
AMD? Most tutorials point to Nvidia GPUs.
- Later you'll find that AMD apparently is better for games, but lousy at multimedia.

Then you chose a distro.

Ubuntu is turning evil and everyone hates on them for using snap
Everyone laughed at LinusTechTips for using PopOS! Which constantly pops up as a good distro for beginners and specifically Davinci (for some reason).
Fedora keeps being suggested as a good distro, till you install Davinci and people tell you that at best it needs some dependency fuckery
RedHat everyone tells you is hopelessly outdated and why would anyone use that on a personal PC?
Mint has burned me in the past with completely breaking because I didn't update on time before the maintainers started deleting "outdated" packages from their repos that their updater insisted on downloading.
Arch is for posers ----- btw.
OpenSuse has also let me down and tried downloading tens of gigs in bloatware after months of use and then bricke ditself so hard, no recovery would work on it.
Only after researching for hours, I found out what BlackMagic officially suggest.
- Rocky Linux 8.6, which has hit its end of life 3.5 years ago (November 2022) - WTF?!
  - No mentioning if the newer rocky versions would work....

Problems once distro is installed

I went with Fedora 43 KDE since I can't stand how restrictive the Gnome desktop is. All on my AMD ThinkPad because at the time, AMD was praised as - the shit.

After I posted on the Fedora forums, I learned that Fedora is notorious for bricking itself with version upgrades. so, I'm quite anxious about my system once 44 becomes available. My Fedora development VM certainly didn't survive launching in VMWare workstation on my Linux host once I switched from Linux. It just goes into a recovery command line.

The first problems were video codecs, because OF COURSE YOU DUMMY, they're not available on that distro. So, you Google different solutions to get anything that can play h265. I never got it to work smoothly in the native video players.

Apart from that, I managed to get most things to work (except for some functionality breaking after the laptop goes into standby a couple times).

Until I tried installing DaVinci.

No entry in Fedora Software "shop". OK, download the installer then and read instructions. Those instructions seem fairly straight forward - if they worked....

From the start, it's complaining about basic dependencies missing. OK, start googling fixes for fedora.

Type in some random commands to installs those (zlib and some others). Still not working.

Find other tutorials, mentioning a flag to ignore missing dependencies on startup. OK, done. It installs.

Try to launch. It needs some outdated libcrypt dependencies. Follow other scattered tutorials from the internet (Stackoverflow,....) to force those dependencies into Davinci. Finally it starts - sort of. Until you try to create a project when it crashes with no error message. Just a crash dialog. Launching form terminal also leaves no clues.

Now you start Googling, and everyone seems to have a different solution for getting it to work. Commonly you find out that Fedora is too "bleeding edge" and that in general it sucks on AMD - Thanks!? Especially after so many people saying that AMD is the way to go🤬

Some commenters on forums posts that did eventually got it to work, complain about horrendous performance on AMD compared to Windows. Others create custom Podman images and muck around with those. Others link together their own dedicated AMD drivers,......... Many tutorials are also outdated or link against dead pages.

So, I'm gonna have to keep dual booting Windows 11 to edit videos by the looks of it as I can't spend days installing a video editing suite.

The war has been going on for a long time!