That's pretty weird; both Gimp and Krita (very different tools) were rock-solid to me. Speaking of KDEnlive, I experienced a few anomalies and crashes using the version from my distro; I switched to an AppImage version, and with it, everything Just Works™.

I suspect your crashes may also be related to dependencies, not some deficiencies of the application itself. Try a different build / AppImage / Flatpak, and see if you encounter the same problems.

I don’t use any KDE apps, but the Plasma desktop has been absolutely rock solid and super performant for me.

I do think that the idea that each toolkit has its own native app for each thing you might want to do with a computer is a recipe for a forest of half-maintained nearly-good apps. A lot of the KDE and GNOME app suites feel like checking boxes.

Is that due to patent issues? A lot of people running open source H.264 codecs¹ on Linux just ignore the patents and assume they're under the radar, but I bet a high-profile commercial entity can't get away with that. Like as a point of comparison, I remember the Raspberry Pi selling add-on license keys for certain codecs at one point for a similar reason, but that probably doesn't look like such a good strategy for a video editor on a niche platform. Then there was the thing where Red Hat had some kind of licensing deal with Cisco…

¹ I don't remember which implementations are subject to this or what the actual terms are.

It is in the roadmap ;)

It sounds like you have no crash or corruption problems in Premiere at all.

Where did you hear about loosing your work? Did you experience it? Did you report it? Kdenlive has a very robust project recovery system, even if it crashes you are able to recover your lost work. Also in any software you must continuously save.

> having a real risk to lose my project after days and weeks of work is not something I am able to afford

Clearly you can, if you are currently using Premiere.

just download davinci resolve for free

KDE is a community (this year it turns 30!) and Kdenlive is part of it. Visit the website and read more about it.

Regarding you Qt question, there is the KDE Free Qt Foundation, more info: https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/

I cannot tell you which DE to choose, I guess try them both and use what you like.

KDE distros that work well, try Arch (and derivatives like CachyOS), Fedora and there is also KDE Linux (but that is still alpha)

> Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes

The relationship between the two orgs is currently healthy. They have different needs, but collaboration innl the Free Qt Foundation has been productive of late and hasn't hit major roadblocks.

The annual Qt Contributor meetup and KDE events are semi-regularly co-located. KDE people help maintain a few of the modules, or rank as biggest external contributors.

It's a relationship that always deserves active maintenance but has been holding steady overall.

> How is KDE doing with respect to QT, given that QT is commercial (with LGPL licensing) and has passed through several ownership changes?

KDE has the right to distribute Qt under a BSD-like licence after legal dispute.

> Is QT actively being maintained, and is KDE able to incorporate (or better - steer) those changes?

It is. KDE 6 is based on Qt 6.

> How are they doing with respect to the GTK/Gnome folks? (Did Gnome ever get over their issues? I tuned out around the time of Gnome 3 and the headaches everyone was having with Ubuntu vs. Gnome with respect to the desktop compositor.)

GNOME is still very stubborn but many of their works have come to fruition. KDE has adopted Flatpak and immutable OS.

> Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment? (This is not a moral question! No religious fights. I'm seriously curious.)

Depends on your taste really. There are multiple rant articles about GNOME and I can write a fairly similar one about KDE. GNOME is the more polished out of the two, KDE has more features and has a less experimental workflow. Personally I also recommend trying out Pantheon, the DE of elementary OS.

Neither can reach the height of Windows and Mac OS X's prime since many UX issues are deeply ingrained, like FHS and XDG. You'll probably miss macOS application bundles.

> Which distro(s) have the best KDE? I've been stuck on Mac for a bit and want to dive in again soon.

Personally I like Fedora.

Kdenlive is part of KDE, yes.

I don't know what you mean by "story", but KDE is a collection of software more or less (emphasis on the less, at least compared to Gnome) interlinked with each other.

Qt specifically has the LGPL as a non-commercial license for open-source projects. This is part of a deal they made with KDE when it changed hands a while back.

Qt is being actively developed, but I don't believe KDE has any influence on it. They updated the entirety of their stack to Qt6 a year ago, they can definitely incorporate the changes.

KDE and GNOME generally don't care about each other. As for my personal opinion, Gnome's problems have only gotten worse in my experience, but perhaps in ways that don't matter to the average user.

Gnome if you like a MacOS-style UI, KDE Plasma if you prefer the Windows-style.

Generally, any distro will do. Rolling-release ones, or stable ones with a shorter update cycle (like Fedora) will get new features faster, but even Debian has KDE Plasma 6 nowadays.

Personally I use Sway. I wouldn't recommend GNOME. KDE seems okay from what I've used of it on SteamOS, and I have a few friends who seem to like KDE as well.

For a distro, maybe Arch or Fedora. Be aware with Fedora that it's more work than most distros to get proper media playback of certain codecs working, due to some sort of fear of patents. You have to replace a bunch of packages and it took me a while of messing around when I set up Fedora on an HTPC before I got the expected performance with various videos. I run Guix System on my personal machine, but it's pretty advanced and niche, so probably wouldn't recommend it to a new user.

> *Should I choose Gnome or KDE for a desktop environment?

I suggest people try Gnome first and see how it meshes with you. Learn a few common keyboard shortcuts, especially Super Key, Super + (type to search), Alt+tab, etc.

If you know you're a customizer/tinkerer then maybe start with KDE. The knobs can be overwhelming though for people who want a more "just works" kind of experience.

Regardless, Fedora is IMHO the best experience (for a usable general purpose system) for both, so that's a great place to start.

I unfortunately have to use GNOME on my work laptop with Ubuntu 24.04 and it is honestly a pain compared to my personal computers running Plasma. The comparison is not entirely fair because I am pitching GNOME from 2024 to the latest version of Plasma, but the difference in UX is night and day. UI is smoother and more fluid, I can configure my system exactly how I want it to be.

I can't answer all of those but I personally prefer KDE to Gnome, and Fedora KDE or Kubuntu are the best. I like Fedora KDE.

I don't have much to add other than to say Kdenlive works great on Windows and probably MacOS too. Shouldn't be a surprise as QT has historically been one of the better cross platform GUI libs of the past 20+ years.

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