The situation sort of makes sense. These codecs are licensed and fees need to be paid. If you run windows (or mac), those fees have been paid by microsoft or apple and you get codec support as part of the operating system, presumably in the form of library files. So the free DaVinci resolve can "inherit" that legal support. But no such thing is the case with linux.
Here is their official document with a list of supported codecs for 18.5
This video give a nice explanation of the whole business:
The "MPEG-LA" are the bad guys. They are scummy patent squatting no-goods that cause all of this trouble.The video recommends "distrobox" as a way to run it on ubuntu or debian (I can avoid this since I am on Fedora). He actually recommends using Fedora inside the distrobox setup.
The last third of the above video talks about crazy business of using random MAC addresses and containers. (This is the sort of thing the hyper-security paranoid folks do).
This long thread on the blackmagic forum talks about all of this:
There is also trouble with AAC audio codecs not being supported under linux. I get the sound just fine from my Sony Camera, but indeed I don't see any sound waveform (as I do for the Sony) when I import from my Canon camera, so maybe this is an issue for me.Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org