OpenShot 4.0 is out, and the headline feature is built-in screen recording.

Why this is the right feature

OpenShot’s audience is people making tutorials, demonstrations, gameplay clips, and presentations. Overwhelmingly, the first step of that workflow is recording the screen.

Until now that meant a separate tool: OBS Studio, SimpleScreenRecorder, GNOME’s built-in recorder, or wf-recorder on Wayland. Record there, save a file, import it here. Not difficult, and one more thing to set up, one more set of settings to get wrong, and one more source of resolution and frame rate mismatches that surface during editing.

Putting capture in the editor means record, and the clip is on the timeline.

OBS remains the better tool for live streaming, multi-source composition, scene switching, and anything involving a camera overlay and audio mixing. This is not competing with that. It is removing friction from the simple case, which is most cases.

Screen recording on Wayland

Worth knowing if you are on a current desktop: screen capture under Wayland goes through the xdg-desktop-portal rather than an application grabbing the display directly. That is deliberate, since arbitrary screen reading by any application was one of the X11 security problems Wayland set out to fix.

The practical consequence is that a portal-triggered permission dialog appears when recording starts, and that capture will fail entirely if the correct portal backend is not installed for your desktop.

# check what portal backend you have
ls /usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/portals/

# GNOME needs xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
# KDE needs xdg-desktop-portal-kde
# wlroots compositors need xdg-desktop-portal-wlr

If screen recording does not work in any application on Wayland, a missing or mismatched portal backend is the first thing to check, and it accounts for most reports of “screen recording is broken on Linux.”

OpenShot in context

OpenShot has historically been the approachable option: simpler than Kdenlive, much simpler than DaVinci Resolve, and adequate for straightforward cutting, titling, and transitions. It has also had a reputation for instability that it has worked to shed.

The Linux video editing situation is reasonable now, which was not true a decade ago:

Kdenlive is the most capable free option, and 26.08 added track reordering and timeline improvements. It is what to use for anything involved.

DaVinci Resolve has a native Linux build and is professional-grade, with the free version being remarkably capable. Codec support on Linux is restricted for licensing reasons, which is the usual stumbling block.

Shotcut sits between OpenShot and Kdenlive.

OpenShot is the one to hand someone who wants to trim a video and add a title without learning an editor.

For that user, having the recorder built in removes the step they were most likely to get stuck on.