The kdenlive.org web page states:

"As of May 2015, obtaining and installing the latest version of Kdenlive has gotten a little complicated."

... and that is very true, if not an understatement.

I, like many users, run a Linux distribution which does not come with "KDE Framework 5". I have enjoyed using kdenlive 0.9.x for several years, and I would like to contribute at least qualified feed-back on the development head of kdenlive, but I will certainly not re-install my operating system (also required for other work) with some experimental new Linux distribution that happenes to come with KF5.

It could broaden the audience able to try recent kdenlive versions a lot if you could provide an AppImage of kdenlive, as described on http://appimage.org/.

(An AppImage basically is a self-extracting archive that creates a temporary directory which contains all the libraries and stuff some application needs to run. Trivial to use, and only as difficult to create as it is to install kdenlive on some not-so-recent Linux distribution, including dependencies like KF5.)

We won't refuse anybody to work on this, but I won't dedicate time for the moment.
I did prepare archives with multimedia libs included, but I think shipping the whole Qt5 + KF5 stack is too much.

LTS releases with KF5 are already out for some distro, or coming soon for others (so all derivatives will also have it), the problem will not be true much longer.

I believe people making the choice to use only old distro (and no multiboot/VM) should have in mind that they will progressively get stuck to old apps.

lutzv wrote:t I will certainly not re-install my operating system (also required for other work) with some experimental new Linux distribution that happenes to come with KF5.

I feel your pain. I try and use LTS versions of Linux too. However, I think it is a bit harsh to call Ubuntu 16.04 an experimental new linux distribution. I plan to move to that soon.

There's a benefit not only for the users of an application, but also for the developers, when AppImage is used for distribution: kdenlive depends on a large amount of libraries, and chances are that any one of them is not available in a compatible version in a distribution, now or at a later time.

There is good reason why Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel are happy to publically promote the use of AppImage - when they made Subsurface(*) available (a free software also depending on Qt5 and a few other libraries) they experienced how difficult it is to convince Linux distribution maintainers to ship just those versions of the libraries their application required. And unsurprisingly, such incompatibilities made Subsurface unavailable to the users of some distributions, for some distributions even after initially being included, before there was an AppImage available.

The trouble of explaining to users the particularities of incompatibilities is avoidable, as is the struggle with distribution maintainers that dislike including one or the other library(-version).


(*) Not coincidentally, the https://subsurface-divelog.org/documentation/tutorial-video/ was created using kdenlive