State of Kdenlive

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.

> much more capable than basic editors like iMovie, but doesn't have the overwhelming learning curve

Kate/Kdevelop also feels the same way, but for editors. Just the right amount of features.

Minor quibble, but I loved the mechanic of FCP taking over a second screen as a full-res scrub monitor. It made the computer feel like an appliance.

I think the Kdenlive option is to move the scrubbing monitor window to the second monitor.

Or with Tenacity insead of Audacity for the 100% invasive free software setup!

kdenlive to me is like gimp. I launch it everytime I want to do something quickly, without really thinking about what tool to use.

With Davinci Resolve I have to intentionally plan on making a video to be willing to use it, because it's much heavier, doesn't support the audio in most of the source videos I am using, so I have to convert that first, and does a lot more than what I usually need.

I am so embarrassed I have never tried it. I am extremely bursty with video so I just grabbed obs and openshot and use those. I always presumed it wouldn't be enough because it was 'just part of the kde suite'. I will try to remember to spin it up next project.

Do you deal with log encoded video?

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.

Yes, obviously I write from experience.

The title creator is bad... as a total amateur who needs to edit a video every now and then, it hurt me.

If anyone has a better workflow for creating lots of captions in kdenlive please let me know. I had to duplicate each title to the media library and drag it into the timeline, because if I simply copy/pasted then the text content/styling would be shared across instances

Personally, the only thing I want is better crop/scale/zoom to conform badly letterboxed video to your timeline resolution. It can be done, but the ergonomics are awful, and its not clear which of the 3 crop filters actually do the thing.

    - Add image to project
    - Drag it onto your timeline, it becomes a track
    - In the video preview area, use the mouse to move + scale + rotate it and hold ALT to crop
        - Optionally fine tune anything you want with text inputs and numbers

I wish Kdenlive had an api so that I could improve the QOL for myself.

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.

You can write a bug report for each problem and attach a patch with the corresponding hack. Best thing you can do short of providing clean fixes.

My suggestion is to do a “human summary” of what you asked the agent and what it found, maybe supply the code it generated, mayyybe.. but mostly recommend they not review it but instead, the reviewer give the PR to their own agent to do a reimplementation.

Since code is cheap now, why not replace reviewing with reimplementing!

You should be running your own fork before making pull requests. You don’t have to get other people to use it, you just need to get in the habit of rebasing regularly and cutting releases for yourself. Someday I hope maintainers get better visibility into downstream improvements without the politics of pull requests.

Id say ask AI to ‘describe the problem and solution from a high level. avoid code excerpts if possible.’ Submit as a bug report and mention you have an AI solution for reference if desired.

[flagged]

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.

Open source projects do not necessary see alternatives as "competitors" if they don't market/sell their software.

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.

This is a pretty neat project idea and presentation! I hope this goes well.

I'm honestly surprised (shocked!) that video editors don't use a GPU ("video card") for rendering and that it's all CPU based. That would, honestly, never have occurred to me to even try and do this in CPU. Is this merely decades of historical baggage?

That's pretty weird; both Gimp and Krita (very different tools) were rock-solid to me. Speaking of KDEnlive, I experienced a few anomalies and crashes using the version from my distro; I switched to an AppImage version, and with it, everything Just Works™.

I suspect your crashes may also be related to dependencies, not some deficiencies of the application itself. Try a different build / AppImage / Flatpak, and see if you encounter the same problems.

I don’t use any KDE apps, but the Plasma desktop has been absolutely rock solid and super performant for me.

I do think that the idea that each toolkit has its own native app for each thing you might want to do with a computer is a recipe for a forest of half-maintained nearly-good apps. A lot of the KDE and GNOME app suites feel like checking boxes.

The entire KDE ecosystem is basically stuck on c++ I imagine the number of people volunteering to work on it in their free time isn’t exactly skyrocketing.

What is slow about Shotcut? Genuinely curious

Just spend 3-4 days of quality time with it, watch a few youtube tutorials when stuck, and things will fall into place.

(Same story, shotcut → kdenlive.)

Openshot is alive and well and actively developed, but it's still buggy as hell. I use it 'cos it's super simple and so easy to use, but e.g. I use a specific daily build 'cos release 3.5.1 broke libopus again.

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.

It sounds like you have no crash or corruption problems in Premiere at all.

> having a real risk to lose my project after days and weeks of work is not something I am able to afford

Clearly you can, if you are currently using Premiere.

just download davinci resolve for free

Is that due to patent issues? A lot of people running open source H.264 codecs¹ on Linux just ignore the patents and assume they're under the radar, but I bet a high-profile commercial entity can't get away with that. Like as a point of comparison, I remember the Raspberry Pi selling add-on license keys for certain codecs at one point for a similar reason, but that probably doesn't look like such a good strategy for a video editor on a niche platform. Then there was the thing where Red Hat had some kind of licensing deal with Cisco…

¹ I don't remember which implementations are subject to this or what the actual terms are.

KDE is a community (this year it turns 30!) and Kdenlive is part of it. Visit the website and read more about it.

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)

> Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes

The relationship between the two orgs is currently healthy. They have different needs, but collaboration innl the Free Qt Foundation has been productive of late and hasn't hit major roadblocks.

The annual Qt Contributor meetup and KDE events are semi-regularly co-located. KDE people help maintain a few of the modules, or rank as biggest external contributors.

It's a relationship that always deserves active maintenance but has been holding steady overall.

> 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.

Personally I like Fedora.

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.

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.

Kdenlive is part of KDE, yes.

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.

I can't answer all of those but I personally prefer KDE to Gnome, and Fedora KDE or Kubuntu are the best. I like Fedora KDE.

I don't have much to add other than to say Kdenlive works great on Windows and probably MacOS too. Shouldn't be a surprise as QT has historically been one of the better cross platform GUI libs of the past 20+ years.

The valuation of The QT company is currently half billion $. That should probably answer your question regarding Qt.

Google

It is in the roadmap ;)