For what it's worth, while I haven't found kdenlive (or shotcut, based on the same underlying toolkit) to be 100% stable, I've had significantly fewer lost-work incidents with kdenlive than I did with Premiere Pro. The frustration of Premiere's instability was the main thing that drove me to open-source software.

I've never used Resolve primarily so I don't have a good feeling of how they compare, but I have experienced a couple of unexpected, mid-work crashes in Resolve as well. I believe these were tied to my working on a machine with an Intel iGPU, which at least at the time seemed to be... discouraged, I'll say, by the Resolve community due to known stability issues. Possibly the root of evil with Premiere as well, but again, doesn't seem to be a major problem for kdenlive.

What I will say is that I personally prefer Shotcut to kdenlive. Both are basically graphical frontends to MLT, the actual media toolkit/editor (driven by XML files). Shotcut has a simpler, more user-friendly UI than kdenlive and also seems to be a bit more stable/performant. kdenlive is more featureful. I think most people should try both because it probably depends on your workflow which is more convenient.

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Forgeties79 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Comparing usability/stability of premiere against anything is kind of putting your finger on the scale lol

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array_key_first 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Right, but it is the SOTA and the sort of poster boy of everything kdenlive competes with.

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steve1977 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Is it? I'd say in the higher end that would be Media Composer.

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duskwuff 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Premiere is in the unique position of being the oldest video editing suite on the market - the first version was released in 1991! Much as with Photoshop, this sort of automatically makes it the gold standard.

	▲	steve1977 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Avid/1 was released in 1989. And there were others before it, although I think often on more proprietary or niche hardware (Avid/1 was Mac already). Things like that: https://www.lucasfilm.com/news/lucasfilm-originals-the-editd... I think Media Composer always had a lead in feature film / TV. It's possible Premiere Pro had a lead in other markets.
	▲	Forgeties79 40 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Even if they were the oldest NLE, that does not automatically make them “the gold standard.”

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Forgeties79 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Resolve/Resolve Studio and FCPX have significant presences as well.

I’d say its closest “competitors” are really Resolve and iMovie (much more robust than iMovie but same market more or less) since anyone who’s doing this professionally is going to pay for Avid/Premiere/Resolve Studio/maybe FCPX and not use kdenlive. Resolve is more geared towards casual use and hobbyists, while still being powerful in its own right (and free, of course).

Premiere is a (finicky) subscription based professional tool. kdenlive will never be a replacement for that and doesn’t strike me as an attempt at one.