Originally I was testing out kdenlive on linux mint for quite a bit, it was crashing very frequently while performing basic actions. I tested both flatpak and appimage and older versions of kdenlive on appimage, it basically made no difference in terms of crashing. I thought that it might be either a distro or hardware related issue on my part since I saw many people on the internet writing that kdenlive is very stable for them. Since I can’t easily change my hardware I just changed to a distro that is arch based, I switched to endeavour os and basically I encountered 0 crashes so far while testing kdenlive in a similar way to mint, it is obviously way more stable.
So if someone has issues with kdenlive crashing I recommend checking out different distros to see if the performance is the same. Not sure if endeavour os is the right one in terms of kdenlive for everybody but it did the trick for me.
It makes a certain amount of sense. Linux Mint is one of those distros that intentionally ships ancient software. So when you use Kdenlive from their repos, you’re using something that’s a year or two old, or potentially older.
When you use the Flatpak or AppImage, you’re getting a new version of the app itself, but any low-level system libraries that the app needs which aren’t bundled inside of it will also be very old, and the mismatch between the new app and its new bundled libraries against the old low-level system libraries can also cause issues.
Most developers create their software when using a new-ish Linux distro, not an old-ish one. This not universally true, but I think it’s generally true. Such developers are hoping and expecting that you the user are using up-to-date software, and they can easily miss incompatibilities caused by parts of the software stack being very old.
It’s for these reasons that I tend to recommend distros that ship reasonably up-to-date versions of all software. You’ve found one, and your experience with it improving life for you matches my experiences.
I use Manjaro Linux, and there Kdenlive is always pretty up to date.
Kdenlive is sometimes very stable, sometimes not at all. I have not yet found out when.
Crashes occur quite often when I change the colors of a title more often, or the font sizes. The damage is usually very minor, because the automatic recovery works very well and usually only very few steps are lost.
My suspicion is that a frequent undo or redo does not tolerate Kdenlive so well. As I said, especially when changing titles frequently.
At a friend’s recommendation after hearing me complain that I haven’t been able to find a free video editor that works on any computer I’ve owned in the last 25 years (even Windows Movie Maker has never worked right for me), I just installed Linux Mint (21.1 Vera, from a Ventoy thumbdrive) and then Kdenlive (21.12.3) from the OS’s “Software Manager,” and I’m having all kinds of problems with Kdenlive. I don’t think these are due to my being a complete noob, although of course “you never know.”
All I’ve tried to do, so far, is load two A/V clips from existing MP4 files created by Windows 10’s built-in screen recorder, trim off a bit of the beginning of each, and insert a transition. In the course of all this, Kdenlive has once locked up so completely – to the point of being entirely unresponsive to mouse clicks or keypresses – that I had to use the OS “forcibly kill process” operation to clear it from the screen so I could relaunch it – and a few moments ago simply crash and disappear from my screen on its own. I don’t recall exactly what simple operation I was attempting when it locked up, but the complete crash was instigated by selecting “Select Transition” from… well, whatever menu it was in, at that moment: I can’t find that option at all, now, in the relaunched instance.
Even when it’s operating normally and I can sort of do things, there are problems: the default colors for background-and-foreground in the popup help bubbles for the various controls, and in the text in the various Help menu dialogs, are either identical, or extremely similar, so that the text is completely invisible, “white on white” as it were.
Should I be looking for a different version of either Mint, Kdenlive, or both? Where? How?
Linux Mint is good but check which version is the latest stable (LTS). Kdenlive latest is 24.04.2 with 24.05 just around the corner. Download the appimage and make it executable. 24.04.2 is three years ahead of the one you are using, and so much has changed since then …
It seems one can never really know what is happening with which software and OS.
For quite some time I have been using Kdenlive on Mint 20.0 now and it never crashed. To make it even more clear, I use Kdenlive almost on a daily basis.
I use Kdenlive for colorgrading, transitions, stabilizing and much more.
The only “crash” I ever had was completely self-inflicted.
Sometime next year I will have to do a new install of Mint because support will end. I trust Kdenlive will run as fine as it does now.
Just FYI, I’m using 24.02.2 (Flatpak) now.
So you see: it’s not just a matter of your Linux distro. Somehow it could be hardware too I reckon.
This was not a post that might help anyone but just meant to be informative.
A good, stable video editor is very important to me. And there aren’t many alternatives on Linux. I’ve been working with Kdenlive for almost four years now. At the moment, Kdenlive is really very stable. Much more stable than I used to use Vegas Pro on Windows.
My system is Manjaro Linux and I always get the latest version of Kdenlive pretty quickly.
Now my question:
My last little problem was that after updating to 24.02.2, Kdenlive suddenly no longer had the correct color picker. Then I had to install qt6ct on my system with XFCE Desktop. Supposedly this would not have happened with a KDE desktop.
Does Kdenlive run better on KDE?
I think its likely that the kdenlive devs all use Plasma, so its probably best tested under Plasma. But I also can’t imagine this makes a big difference.
There are other benefits to using Plasma aswell, but everyone has different preferences.
I have been using it with AV Linux (xfce and enlightenment DE’s) for a quite a while and had no real issues. Maybe one or two crashes, but I can’t say that wasn’t operator error or something else.
Also used it sparingly on Windows, was able to move projects back and forth with no issues.
Will be trying to run it on MX Linux in the future.