The Kdenlive team is happy to announce the first major release of 2026. This cycle focuses on stability, interface polish and usability improvements.

For the first time in Kdenlive's history, this version includes features implemented by so many different contributors. Our developer community is growing, don't hesitate to join us building a free and open source video editing program that respects the users privacy and provides a tool to democratize communication.

In case you missed it, check out the State of Kdenlive to learn more about the project's health and the nifty features coming soon.

Monitor Mirroring

This feature allows you to mirror any monitor while working in fullscreen mode. It’s especially useful when working with multiple displays or collaborating with others in the editing room, making it easier to share what you're doing without disrupting your workspace.

Effects and Transitions

This release improves effect and transition workflow. We improved the logic for luma files to adapt to different project profiles and automatically reload previews of downloaded lumas. We added a dedicated tab in the transitions list to browse luma files and added the ability to drag-and-drop transitions directly onto timeline clips. This release also comes with a new Euclid Eraser transition and a Heatmap effect. We also fixed issues with audio TAP effects and improved internationalization support, fixed a bug in the Video Noise Generator effect and scaling issues in the Transform effect.

Animated Previews

Transitions now include animated previews, making it much easier to visualize how they will look before applying them. Additionally, dropping a transition onto the timeline can now automatically adjust its duration to match the clips above and below, saving time and reducing manual tweaking. The first version of this feature was originally written by Swastik Patel, during KDE's SoK 2025.

Automatic Adjustment

Transitions automatically adjust to the length of the clip they are being applied to.

Math Expressions

Added basic math expression support in effect spinboxes.

New Heatmap Effect

Added a new frei0r heatmap0r effect.

Interface and Usability Improvements

Timeline

This release comes with many usability and workflow improvements to the timeline, such as a Disable Timeline Effects function to timeline hamburger menu, the ability to import and add clips directly from the timeline context menu with a smart length detection function, and sequences now have audio thumbnails. Other highlights include:

Continuous Panning

Hold the middle mouse button and drag to continuously pan the timeline even when going outside of the screen edges. Implemented by Abdias J Moya Perez.

Fixed Playhead

Added the option to lock the playhead at the center of the timeline during playback, scrubbing or seeking. Implemented by Abdias J Moya Perez.

Playhead/Mouse Zoom

Added a button in the Status Bar to toggle between zooming to the mouse cursor position or the playhead position. Implemented by the mrfantastic.

Multi-Clip Speed Changes

Added the ability to change the playback speed of multiple clips at once either by directly ctrl + dragging in the timeline or by using the Clip Speed tool. Implemented by Vineet Tiwari.

Audio Capture

Improved support for external recording devices, now the channel count and sample rate combo boxes only display values supported by the selected hardware. Also added the option to choose the sample format (8bit, 16bit, 32bit, and float) as well as a button to use the hardware's default settings.

Subtitles and Speech Tools

This release fixes issues with cutting, moving, and saving subtitles, and solves a crash cutting subtitle clips. It also fixes a problem where searching for multiple words in the Speech Editor did not work correctly. We also improved the installation process for the Whisper and SeamlessM4T plugins and updated their requirements.

Other Noteworthy Features

• Added Clear Undo History option in the Edit menu
• Added HD-ready (1366×768) resolution to project profiles
• Added Add to Project Bin option to Render Widget to directly add rendered file to the Project Bin
• Hide mouse cursor when placed over monitor in fullscreen and not moving for 2 seconds
• Added option to edit a video clip with external program (useful for programs like Gyroflow)
• Rearranged Marker menu items into groups and added a Delete All Timeline Markers action
• Ability to directly add clips to folders from the context menu in the Project Bin
• Added AMF encoding profile for Windows

Give back to Kdenlive

Releases are possible thanks to donations by the community. Donate now!

Need help ?

As usual, you will find very useful tips in our documentation website. You can also get help and exchange your ideas in our Kdenlive users Matrix chat room.

Get involved

Kdenlive relies on its community, your help is always welcome. You can contribute by :

• Helping to identify and triage bugs
• Contribute to translating Kdenlive in your language
• Promote Kdenlive in your local community

For the full changelog continue reading on kdenlive.org.

As an exception to my usual posts, this time I’ll write about a feature that’s already released. Since Plasma 6.6, you can enable automatic brightness in the display settings… let’s take a look at how it works, and why it took so long to make it happen.

The hardware

This is where the problems start - most laptops unfortunately don’t come with a brightness sensor, and there’s effectively no monitors that have a built-in sensor either (let alone one that can be accessed by the connected PC).

While it’s possible to buy or build a brightness sensor that connects via USB, brightness control for external monitors usually has limitations in how often we can safely adjust the brightness… So for quite some time, there was noone working on Plasma that had the combination of hardware, motivation and knowledge to do something about it.

Luckily, the Framework Laptop 13 comes with a brightness sensor, so on the hardware side I was all set:

The software

Making automatic brightness do something is easy, but making it work well enough that you actually want to use it is a very different story.

My first approach was to assume brightness of the display should scale linearly with environmental brightness. I tried this, and it was sort of usable, but just not good enough. There’s three problems with it:

1. the brightness setting sadly does not linearly control display luminance. 0% is generally not “off”, and sometimes firmware or drivers make the curve non-linear to make the brightness more “intuitive”
2. in order for automatic brightness to be easy to use, we can’t expect the end user to configure an equation for their system. We need to automatically detect what they’re doing, and configuring two parameters based off one brightness slider is a challenge
3. the best brightness curve isn’t necessarily linear. Depending on your personal preferences and how reflective your display is, you might want to keep brightness a lot higher in bright environments than in dark ones, or vice versa.

So a different approach was needed. I looked a bit at other operating systems for inspiration, and from the UX side I definitely wanted to copy Android: You use the brightness slider however you want, and the system should try to replicate what you do on its own. On the implemtation side however, I only saw claims that it uses machine learning, so that wasn’t exactly helpful.

Ultimately, what I settled on is pretty simple: We just store 6 sensor values, one per 20% brightness step. When processing sensor readings, KWin finds the matching brightness setting by linearly interpolating between the two closest sensor values.

When the user touches the brightness slider or uses the brightness shortcuts, KWin adjusts the curve so the current sensor value will result in that desired brightness setting. At first, I only made it adjust the two closest points and enforce the rest of the curve to be monotonic, but it ended up causing problems:

With this configuration, any sensor readings above 100 lux - for example, 101 - resulted in 100% brightness. To fix that, we now enforce a minimum difference of at least 1 lux or 10% between control points, so the curve above would look more like

To ensure the curve would always stay strictly monotonic and so you can have an arbitrary backlight setting at zero lux, values below zero also had to be allowed when updating the curve with those constraints.

However, I was still not done. While it now followed my preferences pretty well, it was still annoying! Especially if you sit in between a light source and the laptop, or if you sit on a train with trees around the tracks (like I recently did, traveling to and from Graz for a Plasma sprint), the brightness constantly fluctuated up and down.

To make it less annoying, I added some more adjustments on top:

• some hysteresis. As long as the sensor reports ±10% of the last value, KWin should do nothing
• a time delay before changes get applied. If after two seconds the sensor value is back in that 10% range, the brightness stays unchanged
• a much slower animation for reducing display brightness (but not that much slower for increasing it)

This is how it was released in Plasma 6.6, and I’m pretty happy with it on both the Framework 13 and on my OnePlus 6 with Plasma mobile.

What now?

Just because I’m happy with it, doesn’t mean it’s done. If you’re using automatic brightness and it’s still annoying you for some reason, please tell me about it! If you’re really happy with it, I won’t complain about being told that either of course ;)

To fully catch up to what phones have done for years though, one feature is still missing: I’d like to adjust not just the brightness, but also the white point of the display to the environment. Unfortunately, none of my devices have a sensor for that… but since the camera module in the Framework 13 is easy to replace, I hope that changes one day!

As many long running projects, Qt too over the years has accumulated some APIs that in hindsight are deemed unsafe or sub-optimal. For example, Qt by default implicitly converts const char* to QString. While that usually only incurs a runtime overhead, maybe encoding problems, but also admittedly less cluttered code, there’s other APIs that can backfire in more subtle ways. One such API is doing a “context-less connect”.

Signals and Slots are a core principle of Qt that make it super easy to connect one object to another and keep a certain separation of concerns. The typical syntax to establish an connection is:

connect(sender, &Foo::somethingHappened, receiver, &Bar::doStuff);

This connects the signal somethingHappened in our sender of Type Foo to the member function doStuff in our receiver (context object) of type Bar. Whenever sender “emits” somethingHappened, doStuff on receiver will be called. The neat part about Qt connections is that when receiver gets destroyed, the connection is severed automatically. However, you can not just connect a signal to a member function but also use a lambda:

connect(job, &WallpaperFinder::wallpaperFound, [this](const QString &path) {
    m_wallpapers << path;
});

In our hypothetical wallpaper selector when the “job” that goes looking for wallpapers found one, it emits a signal and tells us the path of the file, so we can show it to the user. Now what happens when the user closes the dialog (which then gets destroyed) before the job has finished? Well… job still emits the signal which then results in our lambda being called. And then we try to access m_wallpapers on this which is long gone. Boom!

The fix is easy: provide a “context object”, too, just like you would with pointer to member function:

connect(job, &WallpaperFinder::wallpaperFound, this, [this](const QString &path) {
    m_wallpapers << path;
});

If this gets destroyed, the connection is severed, our lambda will no longer be called and all is well. The receiver object also decides what thread the slot is called, i.e. it will be called in the thread the receivers “lives in”. Context-less connections are always of DirectConnection type. Since Qt 6.7 you can actually enforce the use of a context object by defining QT_NO_CONTEXTLESS_CONNECT.

add_definitions(-DQT_NO_CONTEXTLESS_CONNECT)

It requires you think about the lifetime of your objects more and make a conscious decision about what your context object is. It also removes one thing to look out for in code review. I started adding this option to a couple KDE repositories to improve the quality of our code and I encourage you to do that, too! It probably comes to no surprise that in general, the bigger and older a repository, the higher the probability of it using non-ideal code.

What context object to use?

Of course, the situation is not always as simple as our example above. Here’s a few tips and tricks:

• Look at the lambda captures. If you capture this, chances are, you want this as your context object.
• If you capture a single object, perhaps you want it as your context object rather than this. If you use the sender, too, that’s fine, capture them both:
  connect(job, &Job::finished, manager, [job, manager] {
manager->report(job);
});
  When the sender gets destroyed, evidently the connection is useless and will be severed.
• You can try to avoid capturing this by doing an init capture, i.e. [foo = m_foo] { ... }
• Perhaps you don’t even need a lambda and can just connect to the method directly. Lambdas are so ubiquitous that you tend to forget you could just replace
  connect(job, &Job::finished, [timer] {
timer->start();
});
  with:
  connect(job, &Job::finished, timer, &QTimer::start);
• At last, you may also use the sender as context object.
• A context object must be a QObject, though. If you don’t have one, you’ll have to find another way. For instance, QObject::connect returns a QMetaObject::Connection object that you can store in a member variable and then disconnect when appropriate, like in your destructor.
• For connections where it doesn’t really matter qApp can also be an option.

I’m a huge fan of QT_ENABLE_STRICT_MODE_UP_TO that lets you turn on most strictness features in a single shot. The biggest hurdle of rolling that out more widespread in KDE repositories is actually the Java-style iterators. Qt hates them, many use them, particularly for mutating a container, and imho they’re much more pleasing to look at than STL algorithms. If you start a new project, however, do consider setting your baseline to be as strict as it can be!

Chennai FOSS 2026

Earlier this month, on 18th April 2026, I had the incredible opportunity to speak at Chennai FOSS 2026, an event organized by FOSS United. If you aren’t familiar with them, FOSS United is a non-profit foundation dedicated to promoting the Free and Open Source Software ecosystem in India.

About my talk

My talk, titled "Getting started with GUI Design and Music Generation using Qt and C++," was a reflection of my recent contributions to the Season of KDE 2026.

The session shares how I, personally, as a new developer, found my way across one of my favorite projects, Mankala Engine, and started contributing in the Season of KDE 2026. I had shared my work from the Season of KDE, which included updating the GUI using C++ and QML, and also implementing elements like sounds and physics using QT. How developers can make contributions using Kirigami and other QT modules of KDE.

Most contributions are not limited to code, and I also shared the artworks I created for Mankala Engine, as well as my experience being part of Season of KDE 2026.

Here is my session PDF:

I don't like too much text, my session was mostly a live demo :)

Apart from learning about many new topics, which proved helpful to me, I also got the chance to network with other projects and contributors.

Thanks for reading 🚀

References & useful resources

• https://fossunited.org/c/chennai/2026/cfp/bgvph0j635 - Link to my proposal at Chennai FOSS
• https://fossunited.org/c/chennai/2026 - Chennai FOSS 2026

Krita 5.3.0/6.0.0 is here, and 5.3.1/6.0.1 followed soon after.

Read on for a look at development news and the Krita-Artists forum's featured artwork from last month.

Development Report

Krita 5.3.0/6.0.0 Released!

Krita 5.3.0/6.0.0 has finally been released!

However, some Windows users experienced slowdowns with 5.3.0. After much effort by users and developers trying to track down the problem, it was determined some external apps were triggering slowdowns in Qt Accessibility.

The problem was fixed with a backported Qt patch, and 5.3.1/6.0.1 released.

Fixes in 5.3.1/6.0.1

That release also contains a few other fixes. Resize Canvas's canvas size values no longer become huge after toggling 'Constrain proportions" (bug; change).

On Krita 6, incremental version failing to save and incremental backup freezing Krita (bug; change), and moving or copy-pasting a keyframe doing nothing (bug; change) were fixed. Drag-and-dropping an image no longer crashes on Wayland (change).

5.3.1.1 Released for Android

On Android, 5.3.1 introduced some regressions, which were fixed in 5.3.1.1. Editing a text field on Android 12 or older once again doesn't crash (change), which was related to fixes for the text edit popup covering text and the window panning up when using Text Tool (bug 1, bug 2; change 1; change 2).

Handling stylus buttons of some devices works again, and OnePlus stylus button (F21) is middle click (change 1, change 2), Huawei stylus double-tap gesture (Android key 718) is F25 (change).

Additionally, setting fallback languages has been disabled, as it makes the UI unusably slow (CCbug; change).

On macOS, 5.3.1.1/6.0.1.1 was released to fix an issue with Krita's built-in FFmpeg not working due to incorrect entitlements.

Further Developments

Wolthera has started working on the roadmap goal of improving HDR. In the unstable Krita Next builds, canvas decorations such as the transparency checkerboard, tool outlines, and the color sampler (bug 1, bug 2; change); reference images (bug; change); and the pixel grid (change) in are now displayed properly in HDR.

Luna continues to refine the Selection Actions Bar. An issue where the bar disappeared when toggling selection visibility was fixed (change), it's no longer interactable when covered by the pop-up palette (change), and a toggle for it was added to the selection tools' options docker (change).

Check out the Additional Changes section near the bottom of this post for more development build fixes and improvements.

Community Report

March 2026 Monthly Art Challenge Results

The winner of the "An unforgettable scene – 5 seconds before" challenge is…

Join This Month's Art Challenge!

For April's theme, last month's winner has chosen "Microadventure", with the optional challenge of using a gamut mask. What might the world outside your door look like if you were one inch tall? Little things you take for granted may no longer seem so small!

Featured Artwork

This month's featured forum artwork, as voted in the Best of Krita-Artists - February/March 2026:

Nominate and Vote For Next Month's Featured Artwork!

Participate in next month's nominations and voting to voice your opinion on the Best of Krita-Artists - March/April 2026.

Krita is Free - But You Can Contribute!

Krita is free to use and modify, but it can only exist with the contributions of the community. A small sponsored team alongside volunteer programmers, artists, writers, testers, translators, and more from across the world keep development going.

If this software has value to you, consider donating to the Krita Development Fund. Or Get Involved and put your skills to use making Krita and its community better!

Additional Changes

Krita Plus (Stable, 5.3.2/6.0.2 prealpha):

• Usability: Allow pasting images on the welcome page. (change by Luna Lovecraft)
• Transform Tool: Make increase/decrease brush size actions work with Liquify. (change by Carsten Hartenfels)
• Text Tool: Fix crash when activating Text Tool after opening two views on a document and closing the first one. (bug; change by Gregg Jansen van Vuren)
• Text Tool: Select the text that's created on a new vector layer when the selected layer was raster. (bug; change by Luna Lovecraft)
• General: Fix brushstrokes briefly freezing in images with large empty areas, by using coarse thumbnails for the Undo History docker. (change by Dmitry Kazakov)
• Brush Engines: Fix random texture offsets being reset to 0 on every stroke. (bug; change by Dmitry Kazakov)
• Canvas: Fix part of the canvas appearing transparent after cropping the image. (bug; change by Dmitry Kazakov)
• File Formats: KRA: Fix importing .kra as layers reversing the layer order. (bug; change by Dmitry Kazakov)
• Animation Timeline Docker: Select the given layer when selecting a frame. (change by Luna Lovecraft)
• Animation Rendering: Error out if duplicating a frame fails when rendering frames. (change by Raidon Chrome)
• Android: Prevent "Application not responding" message on startup by copying assets out of the APK later. (change by Carsten Hartenfels)
• G'MIC: Fix using a G'MIC filter causing parentheses in layer names to be converted to control characters. Files with these messed-up layer names are unloadable by Krita 6. (bug; change by Dmitry Kazakov)
• Qt6: Text Properties Docker: Fix clicking on fonts in the fonts dropdown doing nothing. (bug; change by Wolthera van Hövell)
• Qt6: Text Properties Docker: Fix using tags. (change by Wolthera van Hövell)
• Python Plugins: Show an error when trying to import the wrong version of PyQt, rather than trying to remove it from Python's path. (bug; change by Freya Lupen)

Krita Next (Unstable, 5.4.0/6.1.0-prealpha):

• G'MIC: Update to version 3.7.4.1. (change by Ivan Yossi)
• Layer Stack: Fix unnecessary updating of a layer mask when merging two layers below it. (bug; change by Dmitry Kazakov)
• Text Properties Docker: Fix popups such as the font dropdown to not be cropped to the containing widget. (change by Wolthera van Hövell)

Nightly Builds

These pre-release versions of Krita are built every day.

Note that there are currently no Qt6 builds for Android.

Get the latest bugfixes in Stable Krita Plus (5.3.2/6.0.2 prealpha): Linux Qt6 Qt5 — Windows Qt6 Qt5 — macOS Qt6 Qt5 — Android arm64 Qt5 – Android arm32 Qt5 – Android x86_64 Qt5

Or test out the latest Experimental features in Krita Next (5.4.0/6.1.0-prealpha). Feedback and bug reports are appreciated!: Linux Qt6 Qt5 — Windows Qt6 Qt5 — macOS Qt6 Qt5 — Android arm64 Qt5 – Android arm32 Qt5 – Android x86_64 Qt5

I recently released version 0.3.0 of my recipe manager application Kookbook – find it in git in KDE Invent or as released tarballs in https://download.kde.org/stable/kookbook/

Changes since last time is more or less “Minor bugfixes and a Qt6 port” – nothing as such noteworthy unless you aim to get rid of Qt5 on your system.

so what is kookbook?
It is a simple recipe viewer that works with semi-structured markdown. More details can be seen in the quite old 0.1.0 announcement

At some point I should do a 10 recipe example collection, but my personal collection is in danish, so I’m not sure it is going to be useful. Unless someone will donate me some handfuls of pre-formatted recipes, I will happily announce it.

In 2025, the Kdenlive team continued grinding to push the project forward through steady development, collaboration, and community support. Over the past year we’ve found a nice balance between adding new features, bug fixing, polishing the user interface, and improving performance and workflow, with stability taking priority over feature creep.

We relaunched the website with a new content management system, refreshed some content and the design, and restored historic content dating back to 2002. We also strengthened upstream collaboration with the MLT developers and contributed several improvements to OpenTimelineIO.

Here’s a look at what we've been up to and what is ahead.

RELEASE HIGHLIGHTS

As part of KDE Apps, we follow the KDE Gear release cycle, with three major releases each year—in April, August, and December—each followed by three point maintenance releases.

25.04.0

This release added a powerful automatic masking tool and brought the last batch of features from our last fundraiser.

-> Read full changelog

Background Removal

The new Object Segmentation plugin based on the [SAM2][4] model allows to remove any selected object from the background.

OpenTimelineIO

We rewrote our OpenTimelineIO import and export function using the C++ library. Now you can exchange projects with other editing applications that support this open source file format.

Waveform improvements

Audio waveform generation got a 300% performance boost, along with a refactored sampling method that accurately renders the audio signal and higher-resolution waveforms for greater precision.

25.08.0

This release focused heavily on stabilization, bringing over 300 commits and fixing more than 15 crashes. Instead of major new features, the effort went into polishing and bug fixing.

-> Read full changelog

Audio Mixer

We redesigned the audio mixer bringing levels with clearer visuals and thresholds. We also did some code refactoring and cleanup. This change fixes issues with HiDPI displays with fractional scaling.

Markers and Guides

Guides and Markers got a major overhaul this release to improve the project organization.

Titler improvements

This release the titler received some much needed love like improved SVG and image support with ability to move and resize items, added center resize with Shift + Drag, and renamed the Pattern tab to Templates and moved the templates dropdown to it

25.12.0

The focus of this release cycle was on improving the user experience and polishing the user interface.

-> Read full changelog

Welcome Screen

We added a new first-run launch screen for first time users as well as added a Welcome Screen allowing to easily launch recent projects.

Docking System

We added a new, more flexible docking system that lets you group widgets, show or hide them on demand, and save layouts as separate files that can be shared or stored within projects.

Redesigned monitor

The audio waveform in the Project Monitor got a revamped interface with an added minimap.

THE ROAD AHEAD

26.04

This next release is just around the corner and brings a nice batch of nifty new features like monitor mirroring and animated transition previews, making it much easier to visualize how they will look before applying them. Additionally, dropping a transition onto the timeline can now automatically adjust its duration to match the clips above and below, saving time and reducing manual tweaking.

This feature allows you to mirror any monitor while working in fullscreen mode. It’s especially useful when working with multiple displays or collaborating with others in the editing room.

OTHER NOTEWORTHY FEATURES

• Change the playback speed of multiple clips at once
• Import a clip directly from the timeline context menu and insert it at the click position
• Option to always zoom toward the mouse position instead of the timeline playhead
• Generate audio thumbnails for sequences

ROADMAP

Our roadmap is constantly being reviewed and updated, and some of the upcoming highlights include implementing the new features in MLT, the multimedia framework which powers Kdenlive. Some exciting upcoming features include 10/12 bit color support, playback optimizations (decoding), and OpenFX support. (Shoutout to a Kdenlive community member for leading this effort). Also expected is a refactoring of the subtitle system as well as continuing to develop the Advanced Trimming Tools.

DOPESHEET

We are currently working on refactoring the keyframing system and implementing a Dopesheet, basically it is a dedicated timeline for managing and viewing keyframes from multiple effects simultaneously. This work will also introduce per-parameter keyframing (currently, once you add a keyframe to an effect, it is applied to all parameters by default). More info can be found in the last status report. This work is made possible through an NGI Zero Commons grant via NLnet.

MICROSOFT STORE

We have been working on enabling and fixing multiple modules in MLT to compile with MSVC allowing us to ship Kdenlive in the Microsoft Store soon. Another advantage is that it will allow to run unit tests on our CI for Windows.

COMMUNITY

NEW CONTRIBUTORS

Currently, the Kdenlive core team is made up of 8 active members, including 2 developers.

In 2025, 38 people contributed code to Kdenlive (including the core dev team and other KDE devs), a truly impressive number! Even more exciting, about half of them were first-time contributors, which is always great. We hope to see many of them continue contributing in the future. On behalf of the Kdenlive team, we salute you all!

SPRINTS AND EVENTS

AMSTERDAM SPRINT

In February, part of the Kdenlive core team met in Amsterdam for a short sprint, highlighted by a visit to the Blender Foundation, where we met with Francesco Siddi and he shared valuable insights into Blender’s history and offered advice on product management for Kdenlive. We also attended their weekly open session, where artists and developers present progress on ongoing projects. During the sprint, we discussed and advanced several technical topics, some highlights include:

• Refining the audio workflow task
• Developing a proof of concept to improve clip timecode handling
• Finishing an MLT Framework patch to enable rendering without a display server (needed for Flatpak testing)

BERLIN SPRINT

The Berlin sprint was one of our most productive gatherings to date. Most of the team was there in person, and we also connected online with those who couldn’t make it. We discussed just about every aspect of the project, from roadmap planning to upcoming features and workflow improvements. Some of the highlights include:

• Evaluated the current state of the Titler and discussed possible integration with Glaxnimate
• Reorganized the Menu structure
• Developed a proof of concept for using KDDockWidgets
• Redesigned and started development of the audio clip view in the Clip Monitor

Thanks to the nice folks at c-base who kindly hosted us.

AKADEMY 2025

Akademy is always a great opportunity to exchange ideas with the broader KDE and Qt communities. One of the highlights was meeting the maintainer of Glaxnimate, where we discussed common goals and ways to collaborate. This year, Akademy will be in Graz on the 19-24 of September, and we hope to see you there.

SHOWCASE

We’re very happy to see more YouTube channels talking about Kdenlive. Here are some examples of what the community has been creating.

We'd love to see what you've been working on in the past year. Share your videos productions in the comments!

SPREAD THE WORD

Help us grow the community by organizing meetups, talks, or workshops in your local area. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you need guidance, materials, or support to get started.

Below are photos from a workshop with indigenous communities in Paraguay.

STATS

DOWNLOADS

• Kdenlive was downloaded 11,500,714 times from our download page in 2025. Do note that many additional installs happen through Linux distribution package managers, the Snap Store, Flathub, and other third-party servers, where statistics are not always available or reliably measurable.
• The Flatpak package from Flathub gets 41,499 downloads per month.
• 25.04.2 got the most number of downloads.
• 17.08.2 was downloaded 1 time!

Downloads per release cycle

CODE COMMITS

Per Release Cycle

• 25.04 cycle: 403 commits
• 25.08 cycle: 368 commits
• 25.12 cycle: 405 commits

Files With Most Code Changes

• src/mainwindow.cpp: 102 commits
• src/bin/bin.cpp: 70 commits
• src/timeline2/view/timelinecontroller.cpp: 67 commits
• src/monitor/monitor.cpp: 60 commits
• data/org.kde.kdenlive.appdata.xml: 57 commits

Files With Most Bug Fixes

• src/mainwindow.cpp: 1021 commits
• src/timeline2/model/timelinemodel.cpp: 600 commits
• src/bin/bin.cpp: 593 commits
• src/timeline2/view/timelinecontroller.cpp: 506 commits
• src/renderer.cpp: 501 commits

USERBASE

Continent

• 🌍 Europe — 949,077
• 🌎 Americas — 781,131
• 🌏 Asia — 750,406
• 🌍 Africa — 127,948
• 🌏 Oceania — 53,397
• 🧊 Antarctica — 5

To the 5 of you in Antarctica, let us know what you are editing. ;)

Country

• 🇺🇸 United States — 392,967
• 🇮🇳 India — 267,449
• 🇧🇷 Brazil — 153,319
• 🇩🇪 Germany — 118,115
• 🇫🇷 France — 111,071
• 🇨🇳 China — 104,692
• 🇷🇺 Russia — 96,051
• 🇪🇸 Spain — 91,052
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom — 86,165
• 🇮🇹 Italy — 61,814

Region

• 🇺🇸 California, United States — 42,769
• 🇧🇷 São Paulo, Brazil — 37,452
• 🇮🇳 Tamil Nādu, India — 27,313
• 🇫🇷 Île-de-France, France — 26,755
• 🇮🇳 Mahārāshtra, India — 25,246
• 🇺🇸 Texas, United States — 22,470
• 🇨🇦 Ontario, Canada — 20,016
• 🇳🇱 Noord-Holland, Netherlands — 19,826
• 🇺🇸 Florida, United States — 18,997
• 🇨🇳 Shanghai Shi, China — 18,991

FUNDING

Ever since our last, and very successful, fundraiser in 2022, we haven’t actively asked for donations, yet the community has continued to support us. We are very grateful for that.

In 2025, we received a total of €9,344.80 from donations (down from €11,526.61 in 2024). Around 30% of the amount was given by donors who kindly set up a recurring plan. The average donation was about €25, with the lowest amount being €10 and the highest €500.

We allocate 20% of our budget to KDE e.V. to support infrastructure costs (servers and related expenses), as well as administration, legal support, and travel. As in previous years, your contributions enable us to continue supporting Jean-Baptiste (Kdenlive's maintainer), allowing him to dedicate several days each month to Kdenlive in addition to his volunteer work.

WE NEED YOUR SUPPORT

Kdenlive needs your support to keep growing and improving. If just a quarter of the people who downloaded Kdenlive in 2025 contributed €5, our maintainers would be able to dedicate more time to the project, and it would even allow us to hire more develpers to speed up development and improve stability. Small amounts can make a big difference, please consider making a donation.

More options to donate

You may also contribute by getting involved and helping in:

• Reporting, debugging, and triaging bugs
• Translating Kdenlive in your language
• Promote Kdenlive in your local community

If you have recently installed a very up-to-date Linux distribution with a desktop environment, or upgraded your system on a rolling-release distribution, you might have noticed that your home directory has a new folder: “Projects”

Why?

With the recent 0.20 release of xdg-user-dirs we enabled the “Projects” directory by default. Support for this has already existed since 2007, but was never formally enabled. This closes a more than 11 year old bug report that asked for this feature.

The purpose of the Projects directory is to give applications a default location to place project files that do not cleanly belong into one of the existing categories (Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos). Examples of this are software engineering projects, scientific projects, 3D printing projects, CAD design or even things like video editing projects, where project files would end up in the “Projects” directory, with output video being more at home in “Videos”.

By enabling this by default, and subsequently in the coming months adding support to GLib, Flatpak, desktops and applications that want to make use of it, we hope to give applications that do operate in a “project-centric” manner with mixed media a better default storage location. As of now, those tools either default to the home directory, or will clutter the “Documents” folder, both of which is not ideal. It also gives users a default organization structure, hopefully leading to less clutter overall and better storage layouts.

This sucks, I don’t like it!

As usual, you are in control and can modify your system’s behavior. If you do not like the “Projects” folder, simply delete it! The xdg-user-dirs utility will not try to create it again, and instead adjust the default location for this directory to your home directory. If you want more control, you can influence exactly what goes where by editing your ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs configuration file.

If you are a system administrator or distribution vendor and want to set default locations for the default XDG directories, you can edit the /etc/xdg/user-dirs.defaults file to set global defaults that affect all users on the system (users can still adjust the settings however they like though).

What else is new?

Besides this change, the 0.20 release of xdg-user-dirs brings full support for the Meson build system (dropping Automake), translation updates, and some robustness improvements to its code. We also fixed the “arbitrary code execution from unsanitized input” bug that the Arch Linux Wiki mentions here for the xdg-user-dirs utility, by replacing the shell script with a C binary.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!