How does it compare to Shotcut? It was my go-to for (very minor) video editting.
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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Please don't do that in headlines. It's ugly to be distinct, and then that becomes the dominant strategy for attention, and then it's ugly and also indistinct.
I've been stuck in the past and was still using Sony Vegas for editing videos for about 15 years until I recently tried Kdenlive out. I think it's pretty good so far and it seems intuitive, the biggest hurdle for me is getting used to the layout and the new keyboard shortcuts to learn, but I think I'll be able to adjust!
Since my world is 100% pain, I use Blender for video editing. Should probably try something else.
Over the years I tried Kino, Kdenlive, cinerella, openshot, shotcut and lightworks. Not buecause I wanted but because every couple of months some bug would make one of them crash constantly and I had to look for a new one. I think it's more stable now and all/most of them are usable for simple editing. No idea which one is the strongest now though.
Iβve used a fair share of video editors over the years. Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere, DaVinci Resolve and KDENlive.
Even in Linux Resolve is the better editor and works with my workflow. However the hardware requirements is large, and the use of ffmpeg to convert mp4 aac to a useable format is annoying on Linux, but nothing a batch script canβt help with.
KDENlive feel like an in between step of Windows Movie maker, and. Vegas. It has the functionality of a more advanced video editors, but its UI makes it feel as restrictive as Movie Maker.
There is a strong app here, it just needs polish like Audacity is getting. Hoping it gets better, since actual competition in Linux is a win for everyone.
Well we'll sick Tantacrul on it once he's done with Audacity, MuseScore, GIMP and FreeCAD.
I am just hopeful other open sources devs takes inspiration from the work done here.
It has been my experience that major improvements to the UX of open source projects comes when someone who has been there the whole time leaves and new blood replaces them, often someone with commercial interest. FreeCAD got a major bump when Ondsel came in, for example. Ondsel didn't have a viable business model, "We'll take the crappy FOSS joke CAD app and sell cloud services for it" which I really hope didn't get them a single customer, and I'm really happy some of their money was deprived of them improving FreeCAD.
I donβt think there is much you can do to fix freecad. That said, itβs my go to cad software and the improvements while small are nice to have.
Well like, the actual smart dimension tool was nice, thanks for finally joining us in the 21st century. An actual assembly workbench, even if it is a bit jank, we finally got that out the door. My understanding is a big reason that was able to go through was some old blood departed. And I think that's a story that FOSS can tell over and over again, someone likes the code they wrote the way they wrote it for sentimental reasons even if it has the UX of a yeast infection.
I recently switched to Linux and was disappointed to find that Resolve is next to useless unless you buy studio and have the right graphics card. I've been using Kdenlive and it's fairly easy to understand. I do still miss the bin based layout of Resolve, but I've yet to find a feature I used that is missing on Kdenlive. It's just harder to find sometimes.
Crack is very easy on linux, like two terminal commands after downloading officially
But the crack doesn't automatically encode video on Linux. With my graphics card's lack of support it means I cannot use any video files in Resolve. There are some people who can basically plug and play, but I'm not one of them.
I came from Sony Vegas to kdenlive. I am absolutely thrilled to have broken away from Windows and joined the Linux bandwagon but I'm not going to pretend kdenlive is a better video editor. It's the best I've found and good enough for my use case but I miss Sony's UI. I could say the same about GIMP vs Photoshop.
All that said, it's still totally worth the switch and I have zero regrets. I'd rather relearn some things than bend over for the corporations that seek to exploit us.
For GIMP there is a "Photoshop UI" plugin if you still have lingering muscle memory. Perhaps something similar can be made for kdenlive?
Photopea is a good alternative to Photoshop when you need automatic subject selecting and other powerful features. They have a very similar UI, but it's not FOSS and they want you to see ads or pay to use features repeatedly. Nonetheless, it is the best I have found for my use cases.
If it requires an internet connection just to use, that's a no-go. Thanks for a suggestion though.
It isn't open source, but DaVinci Resolve is available for Linux. With limited features if you don't pay. Might be overkill for what you do, and I understand it can be finicky to get it working (needs nvidia, poor support for AMD, very limited format support unless you get the paied version, ...).
I don't really do video stuff, but I did play around with it a few years ago, and it seemed very comprehensive.
Yeah that was the first one I tried. I was very excited about it too. But it would not run on my hardware.
Coming from cracked adobe Photoshop and Premier pro, kdenlive seemed easy to at first. Had couple problems, but found solutions online.
I like the workflow of kdenlive but I very consistently have export failure or memory leaks. It's frustrating.
I think those issues have improved a lot in the past year or so
This was in November!
Have you tried their daily builds?
https://cdn.kde.org/flatpak/kdenlive-nightly/org.kde.kdenlive.flatpakref
I used kdenlive for an end of semester project last year. While I was under a lot of stress, none of that came from the software.
No idea how I should be pronouncing it though.... K-den-live? Kde-n-live?
Everyone I've heard pronounce it out loud says "kayden lyve."
No idea how I should be pronouncing it though.... K-den-live? Kde-n-live?
Yes, that's how it's pronounced
K-dean-liv
I think there's a case to be made for both, she used K-den-live because almost every KDE based program is called kSomething like it's the 90s, but if it starts with KDE then its referring to the KDE suite "brand" so it could be KDE-N-Live as well.
Every fucking time I see it I think of it as K-Eden-Life or K-Eden-Lite which is incorrect for several reasons
Every fucking time I see it I think of it as K-Eden-Life which is incorrect for several reasons
Definitely said that once or twice myself.
so I've used it a few times, but it absolutely chokes on 4K footage on my rig. I think maybe the lack of hardware acceleration for pre rendering?
I have a big project coming up and I'm considering downscaling all the source files, editing, and then slipping in the real files when I'm done. Is that a thing people do?
I've been waiting ages for hardware acceleration to be fixed. It's a frustrating bug.
Yes, that's a built-in feature called proxy video. It makes lower resolution copies of the video files, you edit with them, it's a big load off your machine (and easier on RAM), you can render a low quality version from the proxy files for you or someone else on your team to preview for any last minute changes, then you can render out the entire thing from the original high res files.
She covers dealing with huge files on her shitty computer with proxy stuff in the video
sweet. On mobile. I'll have to check it out later.
Kdenlive has a built in feature to automatically create and use proxies for editing, it helps a ton. I did create a custom encoding profile for my proxies to be a bit higher quality.
This is literally how all professional editors work, the lower res is called the offline edit, then you swap the high res back in for 'onlining' and export.
Yeh, either proxy editing (where it's low res versions until export).
Or you could try a more suitable intermediary codec.
I presume you are editing h.264 or something else with "temporal compression". Essentially there are a few full frames every second, and the other frames are stored as changes. Massively reduces file size, but makes random access expensive as hell.
Something like ProRes, DNxHD... I'm sure there are more. They store every frame, so decoding doesn't require loading the last full frame and applying the changes to the current frame.
You will end up with massive files (compared to h.264 etc), but they should run a lot better for editing.
And they are lossless, so you convert source footage then just work away.
Really high res projects will combine both of these. Proxy editing with intermediary codecs
Davinci Resolve is also free and supports Linux. Maybe the best non-adobe video editor I've ever used. I do use kdenlive for smaller jobs but davinci is on another level entirely.
Don't you need the payed version for certain codec support? iirc
AFAIK even the paid version doesnβt have much in the name of codec support. But itβs trivial to use ffmpeg to convert file formats
I wasn't aware. Which ones?
Davinci Resolve is also free and supports Linux.
Isn't that proprietary software, as in, if there's something that doesn't work you'll have to send them a bug report and hope they'll eventually fix it, but they'll never give you the source code so that you could fix it yourself?
Yes, important to know it's gratis and not libre. For many people that's fine. I think very few are cool enough to fix their own bugs, but still it's often significant on principle.
I have the same complain for danvinci and kdenlive since I just use it for memes and shitposts... Fucking resize the whole project and the render when I import the first media.
If I need a different render size I'll change it later but it's annoying having to manually change everything every time.
At least for someone who constantly uses different sizes really makes it hard to like since it's a whole thing for some minor shit.