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!

This April, KDE once again had a sprint in Graz, Austria. This one was deemed a "Mega Sprint" as unlike last year it was not just for Plasma, but for everything KDE-related from Plasma, goals, frameworks, apps, and more. We had a great turnout!

Amazingly I managed to go the whole trip this time without getting sick! 😊

We covered a lot of ground! Briefly, a few of the things off the top of my head:

Testing​

Improving reliability, ease of running locally, documentation, and ensuring that test failures are reported by the CI in merge requests. We have some work to do for all of these to improve our testing story, and we collectively came to important decisions on how to move forwards.

Gardening​

There is a lot, often not enough hours/energy to deal with it, and a lot of the time people just don't even know about the issue(s). Let's try: being more proactive about closing bad/stale MRs, creating a GitLab bot to help automate things that get people's attention, keep track of things by sending regular notices to the mailing list(s) similar to how the "failing ci" emails help people keep on top of things.

Gestures​

A complicated topic! We had a lot of good discussions about the user flow/UI/UX, and I think we came to a really good place that sets us up for some excellent custom gestures/bindings with the fantastic work by Jakob & Natalie.

This sort of work is a really great example of something that would have been very difficult to do online, that we broke through with a lot of back and forth conversation/explanation/design at the sprint — which is exactly why we get together to unblock these things and make quick progress together!

Plasma Keyboard​

We covered all of the large topics/issues that have been pending, for example: morekeys/full keyboard emulation, emojis, speech-to-text, Wayland protocols, testing, etc. So much that each could probably be its own blog post! We'll continue to see a whole lot of changes and improvements here; we really want plasma-keyboard to be a first-class experience for all sorts of input stories.

Graz​

We were once again in lovely Graz, and the weather was a very welcome change from the brutal winter we've had in Canada — still had ice and snow when I left home! In addition to the mostly sunny weather and chirping birds, the city and its people were just fantastic once again. 💙

I can't say enough just how lovely Graz is, and how glad I was to get to visit again. 🇦🇹 Special shout out to Kevin Krammer, our KDE local who did so much to make this sprint great for us!

The fact that Graz is a lovely place to go is good news, since this year we'll be hosting Akademy there — I am already looking forward to coming back! :D

I spent this week in Graz, the weekdays as part of the KDE Mega Sprint 2026 and Saturday attending Grazer Linuxtage 2026.

Before arriving in Graz I already did some work on the train from Vienna. I published a new version of kio-gopher so KDE Frameworks 6 applications can browse gopher sites and helped finish the review of KDominate, Albert Vaca's latest tactical game.

At the Sprint itself many things were achieved, too many to remember. 

There was some discussion about improving release notes so they go into the appstream files and end up in lots of interesting places (apps.kde.org, Discover, etc).

I also talked a bit with David Edmundson on how to streamline our work in the KDE Security team.

Another important thing was that we introduced a way to help us enable the LeakSanitizer in more repositories (by ignoring leaks that are not our fault and that we can't control) 

Non-planned group photo of Sprint attendees, a few are missing. Apologies!

While we were at the Sprint it was announced that we will have Akademy 2026 also in Graz. So start preparing to visit Austria in late September! 

Grazer Linuxtage was very nice, as far as I've heard also very successful in attendance, with the estimate being around 50% more than the previous year (hard to calculate when you don't require registration).

There were not many talks in English but the ones I attended were interesting. If you have time I would recommend giving them a quick skim to see if they interest you.

Transitous - Free and Open Public transport routing  (from KDE's own Volker Krause)

What can we learn from Android for other embedded Linux systems security? (Every app in Android is a different Linux user)

LibreOffice: What we're doing, where we're going, and how you can help (Very fashionable given the latest rifts in the community (sadly))

How we hacked the Bavarian State with an Open Source Open Letter (About how to pressure administrations not to give Microsoft all of our tax money)

I gave a talk about KDE and the 30 years of the Linux desktop, that from the reaction of the attendees I think it was well received, that's always nice :) 

The video from my talk is available at https://media.ccc.de/v/glt26-691-kde-30-years-of-the-linux-desktop 

Thanks everyone involved in the organization and Kevin Krammer in particular for hosting us! 

I’ve been on the Akademy organizing team and contributing in various cat-herding capacities since 2023, but this is the first time I’ve joined other contributors for a Sprint.

My mission this week has been to scout locations and activities for the Akademy conference later this year. One of the members of our local organizing team let me (temporarily) adopt their stuffed Konqi, so I have been wandering around Graz and the state of Styria with a stuffed dragon taking a bunch of pictures, drinking Aperol Spritz, eating chocolate, and petting animals to make sure that all the places we visit in September will be fun and accessible for everyone who joins.

This year KDE turns 30, so we are planning a big celebration for Akademy. I have been thrilled to discover that Graz is very accessible. The town tourism website has a guide for navigating with a wheelchair or other mobility devices; many restaurants have mocktails or homemade juice/tea options for non-alcoholic drinks; the city is full of plazas you can sit and sip a coffee in for hours when you need a break from walking, and there is an abundance of parks and fountains that children can expel their energy playing in.

I can’t wait to introduce the KDE community to Graz this September!