Kdenlive has issued an end-of-year update, and it brings configurable layouts and a smarter way to handle vertical video projects.
Kdenlive 25.12.0 doesn’t introduce any flashy new “AI” tools or retina-burning flashy effects, and instead focuses on areas that everyone interacts with: the editor itself.
To wit, there’s a new docking system.
Kdenlive’s developers describe this as being ‘more flexible’. You can now group the widgets you use together and quickly show or hide them. Layouts can be saved as a file and reloaded (making them shareable, too) and saved as part of the project file.
The latter change? That will prove incredibly handy if you work on different kinds of edits as any bespoke arrangement of options is restored whenever the project is reopened.
There is a downside, as Kdenlive devs note: existing custom layouts are not compatible with the new system. If you run an older build with a curated layout you’ll need to recreate it from scratch after upgrading to this – but with more flexibility available, go make it better!
Kdenlive 25.10 adds a new Welcome Screen to “improve the experience for new users, and add some handy shortcuts for everyone [else]”.
One highlight, as I touched on in my Linux App Release Roundup (November) looking at the release candidate version, is the ability to quickly create vertical video projects – no need to rotate the canvas manually or ratios as there’s a one-click option:
Kdenlive makes it easier to start on new projects
If you often make vertical videos for social media sites like TikTok and Instagram you’ll also appreciate that Kdenlive 25.12 adds optional safe areas in the monitor/preview pane for 9:16 videos. These help ensure everything you want in frame is in frame.
Other editing tweaks include a new design when viewing audio waveforms in the monitor/preview area. There’s an interactive ‘minimap’ on top with draggable zone to more easily zoom in on specific parts of an audio:
The waveform minimap can be resized and moved
And the team has renamed timeline ‘guides’ to ‘markers’, which avoids confusion/improves consistency (‘markers’ is standard nomenclature in other editing software). Markers can also show a duration in the timeline, and be dragged to the timeline from the Markers list.
Elsewhere, Kdenlive 25.12 reorganises its menus in an effort to “make them more intuitive” to users.
Existing users might find the reshuffle a bit disorientating at first, but new placements have logic as Kdenlive says it is aiming to “follow some of the conventions in the professional editing world.”
“For example, we regrouped all file related actions like Render and the Project Settingsin the File menu,” they say. This should lessen friction for anyone switching from other video editors (or who’d expect file-related options to be in the File menu).
Beyond all of that come the usual flurry of bug fixes, stability tuning and foundational bumps (notably up to Qt 6.10.1 and FFmpeg 8.0).
Of note for those on Linux, VAAPI support in the Kdenlive AppImage has been fixed so decoding and rendering times should (hardware dependant) be faster than before.
Download Kdenlive 25.12.0
Kdenlive is free, open-source software for Windows, macOS and Linux. You can download the latest version (as always) from the project website directly, or grab it from Kdenlive’s GitHub repo.
In addition to the official AppImage for Linux (which is what the website above will give you) there is an official Kdenlive Snap and Kdenlive is on Flathub. Alas, the Kdenlive PPA was discontinued last year.
If you don’t need the latest features, you can install an older — fully functional — version of Kdenlive from the Ubuntu repos instead. Find it in App Center (or any other GUI package manager equivalent) or pop open your terminal and run sudo apt install kdenlive.
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