The topic of DaVinci Resolve just fixed my biggest problem with Linux, and I've run out of… is currently the subject of lively debate — readers and analysts are keeping a close eye on developments.
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It finally happened. Just recently, I talked about how the only reason I still needed to keep Windows on my PC was the fact that DaVinci Resolve did not work on Linux PCs without a discrete AMD or Nvidia GPU. But as it turns out, I was wrong, and now I no longer have a reason to keep Windows around.
Mind you, DaVinci Resolve on Linux isn't without its quirks. But this past weekend, I fully edited a YouTube video on it, and it worked just as well as I'm used to, so I'm finally confident and ready to move away from Windows entirely.
Let me start with a brief backstory. I had tested DaVinci Resolve on my Linux PC before and wasn't able to use it due to Intel integrated graphics not being supported. Since then, when I looked it up, I always saw that same information repeated, so I didn't think anything had changed. It was only after I published the aforementioned piece that someone reached out to me and let me know that they were able to use the app just fine, and after looking into it, it turned out they were right.
It did take some work to get it going, though. I'm on Arch Linux, and the documentation for DaVinci Resolve is incredibly helpful, because you might be confused otherwise. Resolve is available on the Arch User Repository (AUR), but the usual AUR helpers will not be able to install the app. Instead, you'll need to clone the Git repository for the AUR package to download the PKGBUILD and other files necessary for building the app. Then, you have to download the .zip installer file from the official Resolve website and place it in the same folder, then build the package using makepkg -i in the terminal.
Depending on your hardware and system configuration, you'll also need to choose the appropriate drivers for OpenCL. My computer had the opencl-mesa package providing generic OpenCL drivers, but after installing the app, I realized this caused the app to crash before I could do anything. Instead, since I'm using an Intel Core Ultra processor, I installed the intel-compute-runtime package, and that worked completely fine. I also had to remove the opencl-mesa package, since I wasn't sure how to change what driver the app would use.
Again, I highly recommend looking at the Arch Wiki to have a clear picture of what drivers work best for your hardware.
Typically, I do my video editing on DaVinci Resolve on my M4 Mac Mini, but I don't have a MacBook, and until now, I needed a Windows 11 laptop to keep my workflow on the move. I was worried that even with Resolve running on Linux, something about the workflow wouldn't work as well or be as stable, but that wasn't the case. Or at least not entirely.
Initially, I tested this on an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H laptop, and I did notice a pretty big problem with video playback lagging behind audio, which made it harder to time cuts in the video. But I had never edited on Windows on this laptop, so I wasn't completely sure if that was a performance problem or a Linux problem. So I then tested a separate laptop with an Intel Core Ultra 7 268V chip, first running Windows 11, and then Linux. And this time around, things worked perfectly. Playback was completely smooth, just as it was on Windows, and everything worked as expected.
I'm not a very advanced Resolve user, but all the features I needed worked completely fine. I was able to play back and cut video, automatically align clips based on waveform (so I can sync the audio from my microphone with my camera), add text and images to additional video tracks, and apply my usual adjustments to audio in the Fairlight panel, and I exported in the format I usually do, which is Avid DNxHR HQ with Linear PCM audio.
I've been doing it this way because Resolve doesn't provide great options for handling AV1 output, so what I typically do is export in this format and then transcode it to AV1 using another program called Handbrake. And thankfully, that too has a Linux version that works flawlessly, so my entire workflow is there and works wonderfully.
The biggest problem I faced with using DaVinci Resolve on Linux came from codec support, because some of the most popular codecs in video and audio are actually proprietary. Most notably, Resolve on Linux can't work with H.264 or H.265 encoded video, nor does it support AAC audio. If you're a professional, buying the Studio version of Resolve does get you support for H.264 and H.265, but AAC is still a no-go.
Once again, the Arch Wiki helped here as it taught me the best way to make video and audio usable using ffmpeg. This terminal program can transcode video with a simple set of parameters, so I used to convert the video from my camera (which uses H.264) to Avid DNxHR, while keeping the same audio format since the camera encodes audio in Linear PCM. My separate voice recordings already use the WAV format, so I had no problems there.
Learning these basic FFmpeg commands paves the way to fine-tuning your post-production workflow.
Converting from one format to another can come at a cost in quality or, in this case, file size, but this was a trade-off I was okay with because these are only working files. They're huge, but once my project was done, I could delete them and keep only the original recording in case I ever need it again.
By the way, if you're curious, this is the video after I fully edited and uploaded it.
For a few months now, I've wanted to be able to say I don't need Windows for anything at all. And while I rarely ever touched Windows since most of my editing happens on Mac anyway, I always thought I needed a Windows laptop as a backup if I ever wanted to work on videos away from my home office.
The fact that DaVinci Resolve works this well on Linux means I legitimately have no reason to use a Windows laptop anymore. My browser already works on Linux, I have access to a great office suite with OnlyOffice, my messaging apps are all available through Beeper (and some have dedicated apps, too, like Discord), and I can even run Android apps on the desktop with minimal performance overhead. I just don't have a reason to go back to Windows anymore, and I couldn't be happier about it.
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