Kdenlive

Raised as a usability problem by 23 people on Hacker News over 13 years (2014–2026), in 16 threads.

People raised many different problems with Kdenlive, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 28 complaints

Basic effects make scrubbing and preview playback stutter like a slideshow2026-09-09
Hard to crop or scale video, and unclear which of three crop filters works2026-04-19
Dated, unintuitive UI makes even basic tasks too convoluted2026-04-19
Cropping, rotating or scaling clips takes many hidden steps and needs tutorials to figure out2026-04-19
Creating non-standard video resolutions is a pain, needing an ffmpeg workaround2026-04-18
Timeline is harder to handle than in Shotcut2026-04-18
Moving and zooming clips with keyframes is uncomfortable to work with2026-04-18
Kdenlive's UI is less simple and user-friendly than Shotcut's2026-04-18
Creating styled text callouts requires fighting the text UI, duplicating layers, and redoing work on edits2025-12-01
Workflow is annoying and lacks advanced features, so occasional users struggle to build muscle memory2025-10-17
Couldn't figure out how to export straight alpha, only premultiplied2024-03-11
Adding a simple text block requires creating an overlay, configuring it, and positioning it roughly2024-03-11
Commenter finds the user interface a little strange2024-01-17
Editor feels rough and occasionally crashes during editing work2024-01-17
Interface runs at about 5fps when adjusting cuts on long timelines2022-06-09
Interface is so clunky the commenter wanted to abandon the project2022-05-03
UI feels old and is less handy than modern browser-based editors2022-04-27
Interface feels clunky and the app crashes too often2022-04-24
Editing video takes more time and crashes more than in iMovie2022-01-13
Common video editing tasks take far more steps and time than on Windows2020-06-11
Installation steps are convoluted and a pain, possibly causing instability2019-03-12
Separate clip and sequence editors make it confusing to import and edit clips2019-03-12
Crashes, file corruption and a horrible preview mode make simple edits hard2019-03-11
Simple tasks like adding a tooltip overlay are hard and unpolished compared to Camtasia2019-03-11
Workflow is tedious, with too few keyboard shortcuts and too much mouse use2019-03-11
Couldn't find how to add popups and effects like Camtasia; spent hours with no hints2019-03-01
Can't figure out how to cut within a clip without saving a separate file2017-09-13
Sound editing is rough, forcing the user to switch to Audacity2014-03-11