Kdenlive is awesome. I am only a hobbyist but I cancelled my subscription to Premiere when I found it.

Does Kdenlive still lack GPU playback and rendering? It did when I last used it, and that'll be a non-starter for most professionals

Resolve Studio vastly outshines Premiere IMO. For $300 flat it’s a no-brainer.

I'm not a pro or anything, and I don't edit video super often, but I would like to point out that Lightworks is quite good, and offers a perpetual license [1] for $420 that is very often on sale.

I don't have the ability to compare these things in intimate detail, but Lightworks has at least been used for "real" productions [2] so I think it's production-ready.

[1]https://lwks.com/pricing

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightworks#Users

Resolve Studio is more feature rich by a significant margin and 2/3rd’s of the price. Lightworks is a respectable program but I can’t really see picking it over resolve studio tbh. Definitely not for professional work.

I still root for them though. More NLE’s is good for the editing world as a whole and who knows, BMD could heel turn on us and ruin resolve. I’ve gone through 3 different NLE’s since 2011 (FCPX->briefly Premiere->Resolve) so I definitely don’t plan for more than 3-5 years ahead lol

I got the perpetual license for Lightworks Pro on a sale a couple years ago for $150, so it can be a bit cheaper.

I haven’t done anything with Resolve so I don’t have much to compare to.

Premiere is in a bad position anyway here, because in contrast to Photoshop, it is not really the industry standard, at least in the higher end stuff. That would probably be Media Composer.