I've used Kdenlive pretty extensively (as a hobbyist). It has an impressive collections of features. Different releases tend to vary greatly in terms of stability. I've had it eat my project (and even corrupt save files). Back up frequently if you use it. The last time I used it, it was pretty stable, so possibly they are improving in that area. My biggest complaint is that the workflow is tedious. There are absolutely not enough keyboard short cuts. If you apply the same transformations over and over again with slight changes, you're going to be hugging that mouse pretty tightly. My next biggest gripe is that the sound editing was really flaky when I was using it. I eventually gave up and did all my sound editing in Audacity. I often liked to do transformations with sound and video at the same time and it was really hit or miss if you could preview it, or if it would bug out, or if it might crash things.

The thing is, I really want to like Kdenlive because it is really close to being able to do what I want, but I just felt that every step of the way I had to be very creative just to figure out a workflow that would work well. I eventually moved to the video editor in Blender which has a lot fewer features, but the workflow is really exceptional. I figured that what time I saved struggling with Kdenlive I could spend using other tools for features that aren't in Blender.

I don't do any video editing any more (I decided video isn't really a medium that I enjoy being expressive in), so take my comments with a grain of salt.

I used kdenlive frequently as a hobbyist 5 years ago and it crashed quite often, without leaving an autosave of my progress. I got used to saving really often. Glad to hear that it has improved in this department, I should take a look again. Stability issues aside, I think it's one of the better pieces of open source software I have ever used.

> Different releases tend to vary greatly in terms of stability.

Second that. Had great and worse times with Kdenlive.

My general feeling: KDE software tends to be more unstable (i.e. crash or freeze more frequently) then GNOME software. But they have in general more features. Just compare the KDE office suite, Calligra, against OpenOffice (which is however not related to GNOME). It is amazing at what speed KDE software moves, in general.

> > Different releases tend to vary greatly in terms of stability.

> Second that. Had great and worse times with Kdenlive.

Agree also. Two elements of hope regarding stability : - The timeline refactoring is nearly completed - A nice fuzzing system has been added, which should really help : see https://kdenlive.org/en/2019/03/inside-kdenlive-how-to-fuzz-...

What features does Calligra have that are lacking in LibreOffice? LibreOffice's word processor is actually one of the most feature-rich Linux software that I can think of.

The presentation and spreadsheet do need some work, though.

Yep. Didn't want to compare Calligra and LibreOffice in detail, just tell that the GNOME office programs are much more rudimentary then the KDEs. It's a quite unobjective, unqualified statement about a consumer's expression of the state of an OSS ecosystem.

I tried various video editors for Linux and found Kdenlive to be the best looking, but as soon as I used it I frequently lost work through crashes and corruptions. Tried again not too long ago and it's still very poor in this regard.

I can second the use of audacity for sound editing in Kdenlive. I found it pretty stable though (2018).

I tried to used Kdenlive to make some very simple videos (a couple of fade-in, fade-out, some overlays here and there). Even with the latest versions (and me being a very patient person) it suffered from stability problems: random crashes, file saving problems, file corruption, horrible preview mode.

I don't know on Linux, but for Windows I also had to search around and manually install some codecs because otherwise it wouldn't render to a given format (I believe it was mp4).

Then I've found OpenShot, that was enough for my requirements (https://www.openshot.org/). It has a Linux version. Source code here: https://github.com/OpenShot/openshot-qt

Amusingly, I had exactly the opposite experience on Windows - OpenShot crashed constantly, and Kdenlive was completely solid. I wonder whether we had different system setups, or were just using different builds?

I had the same experience running OpenShot on Windows and could barely get it to run for five minutes straight without crashing on very basic video editing. :(

I‘ve used it a few years ago to edit a video* and it was great. It uses the same UI paradigm as most non-linear video editing software, a timeline with tracks on which you can place, drag and trim clips. I used Final Cut Pro 7 before and had no problems to get up to speed. It was also stable. The only reason I don‘t use it at the moment is because I‘m on OS X for now.

* https://vimeo.com/107907361

I use it a bit for small things and more in-depth for a 30 minutes montage.

For a free (as in free beer) software, it is really good. It support a wide variety of feature that can be extended through plug-ins, has a decent UX (even though some stuff required me to look in the documentation) and has a decent documentation (although some of it is outdated).

Overall, if you are looking for a free video editor, my experience is that KDenLive is the best you will get (as of 2019). It has some obvious drawback (last time I used it, it was crashing fairly frequently, but a lot has been fixed), but if you are looking to do some amateur/semi-pro video-editing, KDenLive should do it for you.

Linux has a GREAT video editor, though it is not open source. Davinci Resolve is fantastic and my favorite video editor over Premiere, Vegas, Kdenlive etc. by a large margin.

Linux desktop needs consistency and freedom (yes, open source desktop needs freedom).

Freedom of updating and installing newer versions of software without waiting for maintainer/distro half of year to build new package (outdated next week because it's STABLE package).

This is main problem of any linux desktop initiative - linux users get newer gimp after windows users.

Hope snaps/flatpack/appimage solve this problem in future (snap versions of apps look ugly now).

I personally solved this by switching to antergos (which is based on arch, but fully usable out of the box). Been running the same installation without any problems for about 5 years now, completely updated irregularly.

Using "stable" distros makes little sense for other than complete newbies and enterprise-like critical usage and such imo. If you don't need bleeding edge stuff they are a good choice though, but for average users modern rolling releases are definitely stable enough.

The freedom is there.

Bleeding edge is development branch of some app like canary builds of chrome.

New version of Gimp available for all windows users at day one after release is not bleeding edge - it's just normal new release.

Meaning of "bleeding edge" and "stable" became strangely twisted in linux community.

New version of browser is not bleeding edge - it just normal life cycle of modern software (year 2019).

I've been eyeing antergos. Any hardware problems along the way?

I've been using Antergos for years now. It's a great way to get Arch on a machine.

I just replaced my GPU today. I ran `sudo pacman -S nvidia`, rebooted, and I was good to go.

As an aside: Arch isn't as "bleeding edge" as some people would have you believe. They have a testing repository, so packages get vetted before making it into the main package repositories. They often wait for a point-release of some software (like Gnome Shell) to help ensure that only stable versions make it in.

Plus, the Arch wiki is the most useful Linux resource I've found. I reference it even when I'm using an Ubuntu machine.

Hardware support is pretty solid, since the kernel, like all packages, is fairly up to date. There's also an option to install proprietary GPU drivers out of the box. And when reinstalling an old ThinkPad, it was also the only distro among the few I had handy that actually came with the correct Intel wifi firmware so I could, you know, install. Two thumbs up for Antergos.

Antergos is not a standalone distro though. Its just an installer for Arch.

nope but install of antergos is always borked in some way. Its actually faster to install arch linux from the command line and fairly easy anyway.

> Freedom of updating and installing newer versions of software without waiting for maintainer/distro half of year to build new package (outdated next week because it's STABLE package).

You have this freedom. It is known as "compiling from sources". In fact GNU/Linux is the only big OS/ecosystem where you have this freedom.

But like all other freedoms, you have to work hard for it.

This same freedom as mining ore for car - virtual thing. You actually can go to another side of universe (as far as light cone allows).

On windows you just can download the same program and use it without any compiling. And you can freely downgrade it if you want to. No compiling, no messing with repos, makeinstall, and randomly corrupted system.

The flatpak on flathub is 18.12.2, which appears to be the latest version.

I don't think you realize how much freedom Linux has. You can absolutely install anything you want at any rate you want with Linux. As soon as that new version of Gimp is out just go build it from source if it is not in the repos for your version of Linux yet. Seeing other comments you have made it really just seems like you want easy over freedom.

> Freedom of updating and installing newer versions of software without waiting for maintainer

Then use Arch, or some other rolling release distro.

> Hope snaps/flatpack/appimage solve this problem in future

These are terrible solutions, not least due to the theming issue. Rolling release is the real solution.

MacOS model is real solution. Like really.

Windows + chocolatey or macos + brew (cask) is better than any repository with dependencies on linux.

Also, do not want Arch or any <distro-name> - I just want LINUX (or Desktop Linux).

One predictable system, instead of many kinds/variants of basically the same programs - one system to hate, one system to deal with. (Arch wiki is good though)

> Also, do not want Arch or any <distro-name> - I just want LINUX (or Desktop Linux).

What do you mean ? How can you have Linux without using a distro ? Are you saying there should be one official distro instead of many ?

If you don't want to worry about distros just use Ubuntu. Argue amongst yourselves about with distro is "best" but Ubuntu has become a de-facto standard by this point, especially if you don't care about "Linux" and just want something that works.

[Awaits inevitable flood of comments along the lines of "I tried x on Ubuntu and it didn't work but it worked fine on y"]

I think he means he wants Linux to be like macOS or Windows where this is ONLY one distro. Which to each their own, but that misses the point of Linux and (s)he should probably stick to macOS or Windows.

> but that misses the point of Linux

Linux is kernel - I talk about good alternative for macOS/Windows, alternative desktop system, that can do much better than other two.

Well, at this point it's very complicated.

And this is why I think snap/flatpack/etc model ("system" in system) is real solution for linux desktop.

Valve's Steam client already achieved same thing: provided one "sdk" for apps, one runtime (that developer can rely on) - because you can't have one main linux organisation like microsoft and apple.

The problem is that there is no 'base system' for the Linux kernel to attach to, the implementations vary widely. If one of the core BSDs were widely adopted, the practise of developers building binaries as they do for Windows and macOS would be more feasible.

Use Gentoo to mix versions any way you want.

easily solved by using rolling distros instead. Use Solus, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed, Arch and you are set with the latest packages.

I have a 5 years of experience in tinkering with After Effects (which doesn't mean that much but I can get around doing stuff)

I tackled various realm of creative production, namely motion graphics and electronic music. This all started when I was using Windows and pirated program of famous tools like AE, but I was able to get around in Linux with FOSS tools. I use LMMS like a pro. I even used GIMP on Windows.

This was NOT the case with video production. I was making a simple lyrics video on kdenlive, but I had to scrap the project because every time I tried to add a little bit of effect, it was half-baked or simply impossible. I cannot change size of the video without having a major headache on anchor points. I cannot "crop" a content right on kdenlive. The problem? Kdenlive is actually the most feature-rich video editor I ever tried on Linux.

If you only do light editing it may work for you, but ONLY light editing. You can't have custom stuff going on as video creation tool is basically not there. I also use it as a subtitle tool... which basically sums up what your expectation should be.

I prefer blender as an NLE (in fact I know jack shit about 3d modeling, so blender is just a video editor to me.)

So do I. You’ll need the manual or some YouTube videos, since it isn’t the traditional UI paradigm, but if you take the time to learn Blender you’ll find that it is a very capable video editor.

It doesn't even let you do frame rate conversion though.

I haven’t needed to do this (it’s an ffmpeg task IMO), but apparently it is possible: https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/14999/how-to-cha...

To my knowledge it doesn't let you go in the other direction with motion interpolation though. Maybe there is a way to get blender to run a video through ffmpeg's minterpolate filter, but I haven't looked into that.

late edit: if any Blender developers are by chance reading this, my greatest gripe with Blender is that it doesn't use ffmpeg for encoding, making it infeasible to leverage ffmpeg's many desirable features and supported output codecs and formats (at least not without the inefficiency of going through a lossless format. ick!)

Ah yes there's that weird design where there's a "movie clip editor" that is a totally different tool from the sequence editor. Why can't I import a clip into the sequence and then edit it? Very confusing.

I probably fit under the 'newbie just wanting to trim some footage' category. I had to put a presentation together using Kdenlive. Nothing special or fancy, just put together a bunch of 'day-out' clips into something nice.

Not once did I have to resort to Google or documentation for help -- it was all fairly intuitive. I want to reiterate that I wasn't doing anything fancy, just trimming bits and pieces off clips here and there.

When I had the need for a video editor a few years ago, i was quite happy with OpenShot. I have nod idea how it evolved though, but back then I found it was the best balance between being easy/efficient and not crashing with the hours and hours of raw videos I had.

Davinci Resolve is your answer

It's the only non-commercial, non-toy video editor for Linux.

I'm actually not aware of another one that uses proxy files on Linux, and with even cell phones shooting at 4K any video editor that doesn't is unusable in most cases.

DaVinci Resolve is also extremely good (probably even better than Kdenlive), but it's a commercial software although they do have a free unlimited version.

> I'm actually not aware of another one that uses proxy files on Linux..

FYI, Blender can user proxy files, although I don't think there is an option to automatically create the proxies when you add a video clip.

probably even better than Kdenlive >>>

They aren't in the same league. Resolve is used in Hollywood productions. The license is cheap, 300$, If you wanted to buy it, the free version works great. The big hardware console for Resolve is 30k.