Kdenlive hits the perfect sweet spot for me. It's much more capable than basic editors like iMovie, but doesn't have the overwhelming learning curve (or steep hardware requirements) of DaVinci Resolve.
Like others have mentioned, pairing it with OBS for screen recording and Audacity for audio makes for an incredibly powerful, 100% FOSS media creation stack. It's amazing to see how far open-source video editing has come.
Same. They really thread that needle well IMHO. I choose to use Kdenlive over paid options, not because I have to, but because I want to. It's quality software, and it being free (in both aspects) is a dream come true.
Be careful with any serious project, this software most certainly will crash and destroy your work. It crashes since many years and developers do not seem to care or are not able to understand how important stability for media creation software really is. Especially small and independent artists should absolutely avoid any software that introduces additional risk of project failure as one such crash scenario at an advanced project state has a high potential of total destruction.
Choose wisely! Resolve is available for very little money and not only a much safer choice, but you will also learn to use an industry standard tool and might be able to monetise that skill one day.
Kdenlive is a hobbiest project and is probably still ok for occasionally splitting a downloaded YouTube video or converting your OBS recordings, but never should you remotely think about using it for a project where you need to rely on your tools.
The developers are not warning you enough, instead still trying to market this software as kind of a serious competitor to pro software, so I do that as a service for the aspiring video editor, taking your downvotes proudly as the price honest people have to pay.
For what it's worth, while I haven't found kdenlive (or shotcut, based on the same underlying toolkit) to be 100% stable, I've had significantly fewer lost-work incidents with kdenlive than I did with Premiere Pro. The frustration of Premiere's instability was the main thing that drove me to open-source software.
I've never used Resolve primarily so I don't have a good feeling of how they compare, but I have experienced a couple of unexpected, mid-work crashes in Resolve as well. I believe these were tied to my working on a machine with an Intel iGPU, which at least at the time seemed to be... discouraged, I'll say, by the Resolve community due to known stability issues. Possibly the root of evil with Premiere as well, but again, doesn't seem to be a major problem for kdenlive.
What I will say is that I personally prefer Shotcut to kdenlive. Both are basically graphical frontends to MLT, the actual media toolkit/editor (driven by XML files). Shotcut has a simpler, more user-friendly UI than kdenlive and also seems to be a bit more stable/performant. kdenlive is more featureful. I think most people should try both because it probably depends on your workflow which is more convenient.
> Especially small and independent artists should absolutely avoid any software that introduces additional risk of project failure as one such crash scenario at an advanced project state has a high potential of total destruction.
I can't really comment on kdenlive, but this sounds kind of overly dramatic to me. I mean, I hope you save and take regular snapshots/backups in case your disk, RAM or just human error destroys anything substantial.
Kdenlive has some unfortunate performance regression when working with larger projects with many clips.
I managed to track down a few of them while evaluating Claude Code a while back (mostly certain actions doing O(n) scans over all clips every mouse event needing debouncing), and got it mostly back down to tolerable levels again, but have been holding onto them because unsolicited drive by AI PRs are very annoying from a code project maintenance perspective, as the changes are almost certainly poorly factored.
Was half considering creating a Kdenvibe fork, but that would also be in bad taste. So right now I don't know what to do with the diff.
I'd open a Draft PR and an Issue to explain the problems you encountered and how you've solved them for your own use cases... then leave it up to them to learn from it or close it.
I get annoyed with "drive-by PRs" only when they lack context or are clearly just a way to get some commits into a project (typos and so on), but any findings that can improve my code or its performance is welcome, in my projects at least.
Creating the PR, doing the explanation you just did, and closing it yourself might be a good option. Then at least your code lives somewhere that someone else can reuse if desired. Ideally combined with a linked issue that you do keep open.
That's quite the impressive feature set. I do want to use Kdenlive but coming from Shotcut I didn't find the UI as easy to use, especially when it comes to handling the timeline... Maybe I'll try it again one day.
Glad this project is still going, but have they ever fixed its stability and being able to change the framerate without breaking the whole project? Last I tried, trying to export the video with a different fps just broke all the keyframe timings...
Changing project framerate is apparently quite a hard problem, even DaVinci Resolve when you change it, warns you that you cannot change it for that project again.
Probably internally everything in a project is referenced to specific frame numbers, which would break if you changed the project framerate.
I recently switched from Shotcut to Kdenlive. Kdenlive's UX is much more intuitive. Lots of features, I still feel like a beginner, which is such a fun feeling!
I'm using it together with OBS to post short demo videos of my side project. I could use Loom I guess, but I prefer to keep my tech stack FOSS when I can.
Creating "non standard" video resolutions is a bit of a pain though. But I've solved that with an ffmpeg oneliner.
Holy!
When I moved over to Linux (2018ish) video and photo editing was still the thing, where I was still moving back to Windows or macOS
But apparently I should really take another look at Kdenlive, looks like a lot of things have improved heavily, that it could hit the sweet spot between my love hate relationship with Resolve and the ease of use of Sony Vegas back in the day.
Thanks for posting !
After trying all the alternatives I can say that Kdenlive has become my goto for video editing. It's so great to see the team adding amazing new features and optimizing sub-systems. Well done.
Interesting that they went to visit the Blender offices, considering Blender still has it's own video editor (that seems to be ramping up on receiving improvements as of late too) which is basically a "competitor" (as far as FOSS has competitors) to Kdenlive.
I'd love to know more what actually went down there, is there plans about sharing of code or something similar, considering the two applications serve similar use cases when it comes to video editing?
Great work responding to the only point I tried to make as weak as possible, and even provided an explanation for why it isn't "correct" in the first place...
Calling FOSS devs "competitors" is such a corporate-minded statement that completely misses the point. FOSS devs all work together to achieve a common goal and don't see other projects as competitors, they see them as friends.
Competition for non-monetary resources is absolutely a thing. Developer time is scarce and other projects can absolutely see others as competitors in this regard. We have plenty of stories of project forks sprouting because of frustration/disagreement/etc and the new fork starts gathering more attention/contributions because of better governance, better devx, saner environment, etc.
Yes, but this is not a case of project hard fork, not even a soft fork. They are two completely unrelated projects.
People contributing to KDE would probably not contribute to Gnome for a variety of reasons - and vice versa - and it's perfectly fine. One aspect of open source is biodiversity.
I agree, that what I literally tried to qualify it... Goddamn some of you seem to write comments with the sole purpose to disagree with the smallest of things.
Blender is a wild untamed beast of a thousand panels. Those who wrangle the beast are wise and powerful. But they became that was from the journey. Kdenlive is a much more approachable quest for someone who is just entering the dungeon.
It will be a beautiful day when I can finally lose all my Adobe accounts and software. Kdenlive is definitely on the right track BUT having a real risk to lose my project after days and weeks of work is not something I am able to afford. I am following this with great interest and waiting for the right time to jump on board.
Where did you hear about loosing your work? Did you experience it? Did you report it? Kdenlive has a very robust project recovery system, even if it crashes you are able to recover your lost work. Also in any software you must continuously save.
How is KDE doing with respect to QT, given that QT is commercial (with LGPL licensing) and has passed through several ownership changes?
Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes?
How are they doing with respect to the GTK/Gnome folks? (Did Gnome ever get over their issues? I tuned out around the time of Gnome 3 and the headaches everyone was having with Ubuntu vs. Gnome with respect to the desktop compositor.)
Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? (This is not a moral question! No religious fights. I'm seriously curious.)
Which distro(s) have the best KDE? I've been stuck on Mac for a bit and want to dive in again soon.
> How is KDE doing with respect to QT, given that QT is commercial (with LGPL licensing) and has passed through several ownership changes?
KDE has the right to distribute Qt under a BSD-like licence after legal dispute.
> Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes?
It is. KDE 6 is based on Qt 6.
> How are they doing with respect to the GTK/Gnome folks? (Did Gnome ever get over their issues? I tuned out around the time of Gnome 3 and the headaches everyone was having with Ubuntu vs. Gnome with respect to the desktop compositor.)
GNOME is still very stubborn but many of their works have come to fruition. KDE has adopted Flatpak and immutable OS.
> Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? (This is not a moral question! No religious fights. I'm seriously curious.)
Depends on your taste really. There are multiple rant articles about GNOME and I can write a fairly similar one about KDE. GNOME is the more polished out of the two, KDE has more features and has a less experimental workflow. Personally I also recommend trying out Pantheon, the DE of elementary OS.
Neither can reach the height of Windows and Mac OS X's prime since many UX issues are deeply ingrained, like FHS and XDG. You'll probably miss macOS application bundles.
> Which distro(s) have the best KDE? I've been stuck on Mac for a bit and want to dive in again soon.
I unfortunately have to use GNOME on my work laptop with Ubuntu 24.04 and it is honestly a pain compared to my personal computers running Plasma. The comparison is not entirely fair because I am pitching GNOME from 2024 to the latest version of Plasma, but the difference in UX is night and day. UI is smoother and more fluid, I can configure my system exactly how I want it to be.
I don't know what you mean by "story", but KDE is a collection of software more or less (emphasis on the less, at least compared to Gnome) interlinked with each other.
Qt specifically has the LGPL as a non-commercial license for open-source projects. This is part of a deal they made with KDE when it changed hands a while back.
Qt is being actively developed, but I don't believe KDE has any influence on it. They updated the entirety of their stack to Qt6 a year ago, they can definitely incorporate the changes.
KDE and GNOME generally don't care about each other. As for my personal opinion, Gnome's problems have only gotten worse in my experience, but perhaps in ways that don't matter to the average user.
Gnome if you like a MacOS-style UI, KDE Plasma if you prefer the Windows-style.
Generally, any distro will do. Rolling-release ones, or stable ones with a shorter update cycle (like Fedora) will get new features faster, but even Debian has KDE Plasma 6 nowadays.
> *Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment?
I suggest people try Gnome first and see how it meshes with you. Learn a few common keyboard shortcuts, especially Super Key, Super + (type to search), Alt+tab, etc.
If you know you're a customizer/tinkerer then maybe start with KDE. The knobs can be overwhelming though for people who want a more "just works" kind of experience.
Regardless, Fedora is IMHO the best experience (for a usable general purpose system) for both, so that's a great place to start.
Personally I use Sway. I wouldn't recommend GNOME. KDE seems okay from what I've used of it on SteamOS, and I have a few friends who seem to like KDE as well.
For a distro, maybe Arch or Fedora. Be aware with Fedora that it's more work than most distros to get proper media playback of certain codecs working, due to some sort of fear of patents. You have to replace a bunch of packages and it took me a while of messing around when I set up Fedora on an HTPC before I got the expected performance with various videos. I run Guix System on my personal machine, but it's pretty advanced and niche, so probably wouldn't recommend it to a new user.
Choose wisely! Resolve is available for very little money and not only a much safer choice, but you will also learn to use an industry standard tool and might be able to monetise that skill one day.
Kdenlive is a hobbiest project and is probably still ok for occasionally splitting a downloaded YouTube video or converting your OBS recordings, but never should you remotely think about using it for a project where you need to rely on your tools.
The developers are not warning you enough, instead still trying to market this software as kind of a serious competitor to pro software, so I do that as a service for the aspiring video editor, taking your downvotes proudly as the price honest people have to pay.
Yes, obviously I write from experience.
I've never used Resolve primarily so I don't have a good feeling of how they compare, but I have experienced a couple of unexpected, mid-work crashes in Resolve as well. I believe these were tied to my working on a machine with an Intel iGPU, which at least at the time seemed to be... discouraged, I'll say, by the Resolve community due to known stability issues. Possibly the root of evil with Premiere as well, but again, doesn't seem to be a major problem for kdenlive.
What I will say is that I personally prefer Shotcut to kdenlive. Both are basically graphical frontends to MLT, the actual media toolkit/editor (driven by XML files). Shotcut has a simpler, more user-friendly UI than kdenlive and also seems to be a bit more stable/performant. kdenlive is more featureful. I think most people should try both because it probably depends on your workflow which is more convenient.
I can't really comment on kdenlive, but this sounds kind of overly dramatic to me. I mean, I hope you save and take regular snapshots/backups in case your disk, RAM or just human error destroys anything substantial.
I still use it because it's great for quick and simple things, and I save frequently, but it is extremely frustrating when it happens.
I managed to track down a few of them while evaluating Claude Code a while back (mostly certain actions doing O(n) scans over all clips every mouse event needing debouncing), and got it mostly back down to tolerable levels again, but have been holding onto them because unsolicited drive by AI PRs are very annoying from a code project maintenance perspective, as the changes are almost certainly poorly factored.
Was half considering creating a Kdenvibe fork, but that would also be in bad taste. So right now I don't know what to do with the diff.
I get annoyed with "drive-by PRs" only when they lack context or are clearly just a way to get some commits into a project (typos and so on), but any findings that can improve my code or its performance is welcome, in my projects at least.
Probably internally everything in a project is referenced to specific frame numbers, which would break if you changed the project framerate.
Kudos for keeping improving Kdelive.
I'm using it together with OBS to post short demo videos of my side project. I could use Loom I guess, but I prefer to keep my tech stack FOSS when I can.
Creating "non standard" video resolutions is a bit of a pain though. But I've solved that with an ffmpeg oneliner.
I'd love to know more what actually went down there, is there plans about sharing of code or something similar, considering the two applications serve similar use cases when it comes to video editing?
i just was a bit shocked to find out Resolve didn't support h.264 on their free tier on Linux, and i don't want to re-encode all my footage to AV1
What's the story with KDE?
How is KDE doing with respect to QT, given that QT is commercial (with LGPL licensing) and has passed through several ownership changes?
Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes?
How are they doing with respect to the GTK/Gnome folks? (Did Gnome ever get over their issues? I tuned out around the time of Gnome 3 and the headaches everyone was having with Ubuntu vs. Gnome with respect to the desktop compositor.)
Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? (This is not a moral question! No religious fights. I'm seriously curious.)
Which distro(s) have the best KDE? I've been stuck on Mac for a bit and want to dive in again soon.
Regarding you Qt question, there is the KDE Free Qt Foundation, more info: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/
I cannot tell you which DE to choose, I guess try them both and use what you like.
KDE distros that work well, try Arch (and derivatives like CachyOS), Fedora and there is also KDE Linux (but that is still alpha)
KDE has the right to distribute Qt under a BSD-like licence after legal dispute.
> Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes?
It is. KDE 6 is based on Qt 6.
> How are they doing with respect to the GTK/Gnome folks? (Did Gnome ever get over their issues? I tuned out around the time of Gnome 3 and the headaches everyone was having with Ubuntu vs. Gnome with respect to the desktop compositor.)
GNOME is still very stubborn but many of their works have come to fruition. KDE has adopted Flatpak and immutable OS.
> Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? (This is not a moral question! No religious fights. I'm seriously curious.)
Depends on your taste really. There are multiple rant articles about GNOME and I can write a fairly similar one about KDE. GNOME is the more polished out of the two, KDE has more features and has a less experimental workflow. Personally I also recommend trying out Pantheon, the DE of elementary OS.
Neither can reach the height of Windows and Mac OS X's prime since many UX issues are deeply ingrained, like FHS and XDG. You'll probably miss macOS application bundles.
> Which distro(s) have the best KDE? I've been stuck on Mac for a bit and want to dive in again soon.
Personally I like Fedora.
I don't know what you mean by "story", but KDE is a collection of software more or less (emphasis on the less, at least compared to Gnome) interlinked with each other.
Qt specifically has the LGPL as a non-commercial license for open-source projects. This is part of a deal they made with KDE when it changed hands a while back.
Qt is being actively developed, but I don't believe KDE has any influence on it. They updated the entirety of their stack to Qt6 a year ago, they can definitely incorporate the changes.
KDE and GNOME generally don't care about each other. As for my personal opinion, Gnome's problems have only gotten worse in my experience, but perhaps in ways that don't matter to the average user.
Gnome if you like a MacOS-style UI, KDE Plasma if you prefer the Windows-style.
Generally, any distro will do. Rolling-release ones, or stable ones with a shorter update cycle (like Fedora) will get new features faster, but even Debian has KDE Plasma 6 nowadays.
I suggest people try Gnome first and see how it meshes with you. Learn a few common keyboard shortcuts, especially Super Key, Super + (type to search), Alt+tab, etc.
If you know you're a customizer/tinkerer then maybe start with KDE. The knobs can be overwhelming though for people who want a more "just works" kind of experience.
Regardless, Fedora is IMHO the best experience (for a usable general purpose system) for both, so that's a great place to start.
For a distro, maybe Arch or Fedora. Be aware with Fedora that it's more work than most distros to get proper media playback of certain codecs working, due to some sort of fear of patents. You have to replace a bunch of packages and it took me a while of messing around when I set up Fedora on an HTPC before I got the expected performance with various videos. I run Guix System on my personal machine, but it's pretty advanced and niche, so probably wouldn't recommend it to a new user.