Augh, I wrote a very lengthy piece here and when I tried to submit it, I was logged out! Perhaps it was a good thing though...
To sum my thoughts:
- BMD seems to be primarily a hardware company
- Big money is not in the Advanced panels but in Pocket 4K cameras (and software is used to sell cameras)
- DaVinci Resolve is no longer a turn key solution, hasn't been for a long time!
- There are more and more people leaving MacOS ("Modular" Mac Pro, Mojave and NVIDIA, need I say more!) and Windows (Telemetry, forced updates, MS-DOS filesystem layout C: D: E: ...) to become Linux users
-----> it makes sense to treat all Linux users like good, potential customers -- Linux doesn't need to be a "turn key island" compared to other platforms (and TBH, the fact that R15 has the support for system sound tells me that they don't intend that either, as otherwise bringing this feature wouldn't have made sense!)
The way Resolve is packaged on Linux should be addressed ASAP. It's a nightmare even for professional environments installed from the official BMD ISO.
It shouldn't be necessary to reinstall the whole operating system if something breaks. It should be possible to keep system up to date (Just
imagine if BMD told all Mac users to keep using
Snow Leopard 10.6.3 from release to release
).
BMD, hear us: If CentOS is too difficult target, move to Ubuntu (/Debian). It's very stable, extremely popular distribution. I think it is the most supported Linux distribution if we use as a metric the variety of proprietary, commercial consumer software available for it (for example, gaming platform Steam). After having used Ubuntu 16.04/18.04 for many years using CentOS 7.3 was like being thrown back to the early 2000s...