How does this compare to shotcut, because most video editors are just unintuitive unless you know the layout of timeframes and the separate frame windows. Why cant we have a single film strip where we can trim and splice videos with ease.
Not being used to the concepts of video editing, I found it easy to find a workflow that worked for me (cutting out mistakes and stitching remaining ends).
I tested a few such as openshot, flowblade, ... about 10 months ago.
flowblade has the best UI IMHO (more streamlined), but it was annoyingly restrictive for quick edits such as opening a clip, apply just a trim and maybe add 1 filter (usually crop).
It also wasn't very stable.
I ended up with shotcut for most of my needs. It's very flexible and has a good balance in ui/features: intuitive enough that I had to spend zero time learning it, yet has more than what I will ever need. Although it's not as smooth performance-wise as flowblade. It never crashed on me yet.
I didn't like the UI of openshot, but this is a subjective thing. Felt space-wasting and oversimplified, which might be a plus to some. It also did crash a lot for me.
I use avidemux a lot for cuts. It's the fastest editor for this by FAR. UI is minimal. I would say underrated, although it's a pretty well-known tool, just in a different class (not a NLE).
I was a big fan of "cinelerra" some years ago. It's blazingly fast, but very restrictive in the formats it accepts, which is why I stopped using it. I mostly cut random videos coming from random cameras/phones/etc, so I value free-form over standardized workflows.
Don't forget Blender. For some more complex stuff, I successfully used blender's NLE to track/mask clips. Worked perfectly, absolutely stable even for complex videos, although it needed slight more RTFM than the other options and noticeably heaver in terms of system requirements.
I ended up using Windows and had a just barely usable system. I had a lot of problems with poor scrubbing performance and renders that sometimes had black frames randomly in them that I fixed by converting everything to prores (and blowing up into huge files).
My long term fix was to get a mac, where it runs flawlessly with basically no effort. It's a great tool, but there are some pitfalls.
https://github.com/fat-tire/resolve
.. allows one to execute Resolve in a container (Docker AND Podman)... and now Linux is my go-to env for running Resolve. Just being able to run N+1 versions of Resolve on the same workstation is a lifesaver.