a common complaint with Kdenlive for many years was that it was unstable for any use. i haven't used it in some time but i have read a lot of release notes and for the past 2 years they have fixed many many crashes.

has anyone tried the latest 24.05 release or previous one? are there any less crashes now? same? less?

I remember it used to crash a lot for me in the 2010s, but last year i used it a lot and it was absolutely solid. I think this sentiment generally applies to a lot of KDE and KDE-adjacent apps, the quality has shot up dramatically.

I am a totally amateur user (use it mostly for research project communication) and I am happy with using kdeenlive on windows for fast video editing for many years now. Yet to see any crash.

Not sure what version I was on. But I did a project in it a few months ago. Everything went smoothly. No issues at all.

I really like Kdenlive and use it both in Windows and Linux: it reminds me of Sony Vegas, isn't much more complex than Windows Movie Maker used to be.

It gives me a look at how the video will be rendered and lets me mess around with the quality/bitrate settings to a nice degree, as well as the amount of threads I want (unlike something like DaVinci Resolve). Splicing videos and adding various effects is pretty simple and while I don't see it competing with something like After Effects, for basic editing it's wonderful, runs well and the download isn't super big either.

That said, unfortunately it doesn't have Intel QuickSync (I have an Intel Arc GPU that would be nice to use) support and the only hardware accelerated encoding seems to be Nvidia's variety, which understandably gives me the following:

  Rendering of test.mp4 crashed
  [h264_nvenc @ 00000175e870bac0] Cannot load nvcuda.dll

At least there's Handbrake and I guess ffmpeg directly as well, if I ever need them.