Kdenlive Sucks
Kdenlive is an open source video editing application and is part of the KDE suite of applications and tools. It is developed by a small group of passionate and hard-working open source developers. But it has a major problem — it sucks. Really bad.
What even is Kdenlive?
Kdenlive allegedly started way back in 2002 as a simple multimedia project. It became a fully-fledged KDE project in 2015 with the release of Kubuntu 15.04.
At the time Kdenlive was released, OpenShot was kind of the video editor for Linux. But it was very rudimentary, if not juvenile. Kdenlive felt like a real video editor.
Kdenlive provided lots of features that OpenShot (and other video editors) didn’t at the time. For me, it was the audio thumbnails that pulled me towards Kdenlive. To the best of my knowledge, OpenShot still doesn’t support audio thumbnails…
Stability or Nah?
The main problem with Kdenlive today is the exact same problem it had in 2015: It is a buggy mess. Seriously; that’s not a hyperbole. As of the publish date of this post, Kdenlive has 562 open bugs.
Common in open source projects, supporters are quick to point out that the developers work on the project for free & on their own time, as if that is the reason why there are so many bugs. Which is a fair point.
However, Kdenlive has been an official part of the KDE project for three years. Nearly every video on my YouTube channel to date has been produced with Kdenlive and I can tell you from my experience, the Kdenlive team has added lots of new features, but the application is just as buggy as it was in 2015.
Unit Testing? What’s That?
Kdenlive has no automated testing process. And no, don’t give me that “the developers run tests locally” shit. Kdenlive has no unit tests, no integration tests, and no CI process.
The code base is devoid of a single coded test.
And before you ask, no, this is not a test case as there are not assertions nor is it part of a CI process that will fail a build if tests fail. And throwing errors and debug messages in application code are not tests either.
So how can the developers be sure that the new features they just added didn’t break existing features or functionality? Surprise! They can’t. They rely on you, dear user, to report bugs for them.
Kdenlive Alternatives?
The unfortunate truth here is that there aren’t many alternatives to Kdenlive. If you are looking for a pure open source alternative, your options are:
Pitivi is Gnome’s attempt at a Kdenlive-like video editor but it is single threaded which means rendering videos takes ages.
OpenShot and Shotcut are fine but they are lacking the rich feature set that Kdenlive and Pitivi has.
If you are OK with closed source alternatives, there are a couple options:
Both proprietary options have very awkward workflows (in my opinion) and cost money for premium features. I’ve used Lightworks before and once I got used to the workflow, I really enjoyed it.
What’s Next?
Over the past year or so I have been slowly migrating away from KDE applications and Kdenlive was the last KDE app I used. After fighting with it non-stop with my most recent video, I can confidently say that I will not be using Kdenlive again.
I’m eager to give Lightworks a try but I want to test out Pitivi first. It has similar features and workflow to Kdenlive but it’s a Gnome application based on Gstreamer instead of MLT.
Either way, my Kdenlive days are behind me. Never again will I lose hours on that buggy piece of junk.
