When It Is Time to Let Go

When It Is Time to Let Go

For the last three weeks I tried to get an eGPU, a Sapphire Radeon RX 580 to be exact, to work. Today’s the day when I’ll stop using anything Radeon, and Kdenlive for the next 10 years. In this quick article I’ll explore why.

It all started with trying to have some decent video editing skills. I don’t want to be a super professional editor, but I want to be able to have some basic editing skills, to be able to create a gif, or a quick video for sharing. Basic cutting and transitions are enough.

After evaluating what’s in the wild for open source in the video editing domain, hint - it’s not much, I settled on Kdenlive. Kdenlive has a problem though, common for every other open source editing software: It always crashes. Like clockwork.

It’s unbelievably frustrating. Sometimes operations won’t work. Sometimes the whole project gets corrupted. Once it rendered everything black. So I decided to go the closed source way.

I installed DaVinci Resolve 15. It kinda ran, but the moment I’d open the nodes editor, or have text transitions it would crash. Turns out it needs a lot of video ram. So I decided to get an eGPU, with a lot of RAM, settled on the Radeon, because, you know, "good open source support".

Did not work. Black screen. Failure to initialize. Failure to load firmware. Etc. etc. etc.

I ended up installing every kernel from 4.15-4.20 using ukuu, compiling by hand 4.17, 4.18, 4.19, 4.20 and even a 5.0 (!!) kernel. Running all these kernels with various flags. Tried different firmware versions. Nothing worked. Opened a bug report with AMD. Nothing. Days of wasted time, that sounds strange from the mouth of someone advocating optimizing everything.

Today I installed in the morning Windows. It’s the first time I had Windows on my main development machine in the last 10 years. Windows booted to a black screen when the Radeon was enabled. I tried the external port with an old NVidia card I had laying around. Instantly worked.

An interesting cocktail of rage and disappointment filled me.

At the end of this roller coaster, all this is a fundamental lesson for me. People don’t care about philosophic ideals when it comes to concrete objects. They expect things to work. And this permeates everything. Goes through my feelings into my work. It’s because is the software that’s transforming the hardware, that I just expect it to be functional.

And obviously, I will try to return this graphic card, and buy one that has a closed source, yet functional driver.

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