For GIMP there is a "Photoshop UI" plugin if you still have lingering muscle memory. Perhaps something similar can be made for kdenlive?

Photopea is a good alternative to Photoshop when you need automatic subject selecting and other powerful features. They have a very similar UI, but it's not FOSS and they want you to see ads or pay to use features repeatedly. Nonetheless, it is the best I have found for my use cases.

It isn't open source, but DaVinci Resolve is available for Linux. With limited features if you don't pay. Might be overkill for what you do, and I understand it can be finicky to get it working (needs nvidia, poor support for AMD, very limited format support unless you get the paied version, ...).

I don't really do video stuff, but I did play around with it a few years ago, and it seemed very comprehensive.

No idea how I should be pronouncing it though.... K-den-live? Kde-n-live?

Yes, that's how it's pronounced

Everyone I've heard pronounce it out loud says "kayden lyve."

I think there's a case to be made for both, she used K-den-live because almost every KDE based program is called kSomething like it's the 90s, but if it starts with KDE then its referring to the KDE suite "brand" so it could be KDE-N-Live as well.

Every fucking time I see it I think of it as K-Eden-Life or K-Eden-Lite which is incorrect for several reasons

I think those issues have improved a lot in the past year or so

I find shutter encoder easier than handbrake

Had this experience too. Played around with Shotcut and OpenShot, really wanted them to be better just because the name 'Kdenlive' is annoying. But alas, the latter seemed easier to work with.

Well we'll sick Tantacrul on it once he's done with Audacity, MuseScore, GIMP and FreeCAD.

This is literally how all professional editors work, the lower res is called the offline edit, then you swap the high res back in for 'onlining' and export.

Yep.

She covers dealing with huge files on her shitty computer with proxy stuff in the video

Yes, that's a built-in feature called proxy video. It makes lower resolution copies of the video files, you edit with them, it's a big load off your machine (and easier on RAM), you can render a low quality version from the proxy files for you or someone else on your team to preview for any last minute changes, then you can render out the entire thing from the original high res files.

Yeh, either proxy editing (where it's low res versions until export).

Or you could try a more suitable intermediary codec.
I presume you are editing h.264 or something else with "temporal compression". Essentially there are a few full frames every second, and the other frames are stored as changes. Massively reduces file size, but makes random access expensive as hell.

Something like ProRes, DNxHD... I'm sure there are more. They store every frame, so decoding doesn't require loading the last full frame and applying the changes to the current frame.
You will end up with massive files (compared to h.264 etc), but they should run a lot better for editing.
And they are lossless, so you convert source footage then just work away.

Really high res projects will combine both of these. Proxy editing with intermediary codecs

Kdenlive has a built in feature to automatically create and use proxies for editing, it helps a ton. I did create a custom encoding profile for my proxies to be a bit higher quality.

Don't you need the payed version for certain codec support? iirc

Blender is awesome!