Can I edit video with Linux?

To give a little equal time to operating systems that are not Windows 7, and in acknowledgement of the recent release of Ubuntu 9.10, let’s revisit one of the most popular free distributions of Linux. (Note: that’s free as in beer and free as in speech, at least for the following distributions.)

The aforementioned Ubuntu 9.10 is one of the most prevalent distributions that can operate as a Live CD. That is to say, you can try Ubuntu 9.10 by running it off the CD that you burn it to (its performance will be hobbled since everything’s being read off the CD, but everything still works–this can be overcome by putting the contents of the CD onto a USB flash drive and booting from that instead.) This is one of the reasons why I really like this distro. If you’ve never had any exposure to Linux before, it’s worth a try; the hardest part about it is probably burning the ISO image that you download onto a blank CD. And both Fedora and OpenSUSE have new versions coming out soon as well. These are also popular free distributions with deep-seeded roots. All of them are worth trying out if you have some extra hard drive space.

But there are many more distributions than just these: check out DistroWatch for information on literally hundreds of Linux, BSD and Solaris distributions. You can filter down to the distributions that will best suit your needs. While not everyone can replace Windows outright with a Linux distribution, you might find that a free operating system offers a great way to eke some more life out of an old system that you can’t part with, or for cobbling something new together for pretty cheap.

So, back to the question we raised in the headline: can one edit video with Linux? The answer is an unqualified yes! There are at least 10 free video editing applications that can be run with Linux. At least a couple even offer AVCHD support. For more information on what’s out there and what might be worth a try, hit Wikipedia’s Comparison of video editing software and List of video editing software.