flowblade

Flowblade is a desktop video editor for Linux: cut clips on a multi-track timeline, add filters and titles, and export. Janne Liljeblad has led it for over a decade, and it is GPL-3.0 and free with no paid edition. It is for cutting footage by hand, not an AI clip generator.

Install is a Flatpak from Flathub or your distro's package manager, so there is nothing to host. It runs on the MLT engine, the same one behind Shotcut and Kdenlive. You get up to 21 video and audio tracks, 50+ image filters, 30+ audio filters, keyframed compositing, batch rendering, and NVENC or VAAPI hardware encoding.

Solo creators and small teams on Linux can edit real projects with it and pay nothing. CapCut has no Linux desktop app, so for a Linux shop this is a practical replacement for the editing part, just not the templates or auto-captions. OpenCut-app/OpenCut is the browser-based option if you want something closer to CapCut's feel.

The catch is scope and platform. Linux only, no Mac or Windows build. The known-issues list says MKV recordings from OBS may not edit properly until you re-encode, and several long-standing bugs are marked as not planned for a fix.