Switching to a different distro made kdenlive much more stable

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.

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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.

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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.

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