I wouldn’t recommend editing videos using a virtual machine, the performance will probably be quite miserable.

Distro doesn't really matter here. Choose any that you like.

The distribution shouldn’t matter a lot. Just look at your preferred tools and see what they package for.

Which video editor did you use ? Mint shouldnt fell clunky out of the box, maybe the editor you choose was too much for your hardware, or you had some hardware/instalation specific issue, Da Vinci Resolve is quite heavy on resources, maybe Kdenlive would perform better on this machine.

There are many lightweight basic video editors o linux, give them a try to check if the clunkynes go away.

• Trying Linux in VirtualBox for 3D gaming or video editing will give you poor performance. You may get better performance running Linux from a Linux live usb/cd image.

• For video editors Shotcut is gaining popularity and features. It is also available for Windows so you can try it without a Linux installation : https://shotcut.org/download

• Not sure if for video editing you should go for a specific Linux flavor, like https://ubuntustudio.org but "distro-hopping" is not a bad thing in my opinion. Try a few Linux distributions and see what you like and dislike, and then decide on your favorite. A tool like Ventoy can make it very easy to have ten or more Linux flavors on your usb pen drive to play with.

Take a look at „The Linux Experiment“ on YouTube or tidal. He switched his whole setup to Linux and runs a business on top of free software, including editing his screen casts.

Edit: he uses tuxedo computers hardware and the OS it is shipped with, Tuxedo OS, which is Debian based.

Any distro you like, then just install davinci resolve in a Distrobox (or Toolbox) container that meets the requirements that blackmagic design put out. Iirc someone even created a script that puts it all in Distrobox.

I would just use kdenlive personally since the UI is very straightforward. I think almost every distro has kdenlive, and if it isn't on the package manager of the distro you can install it as a flatpak as well.

Maybe try distros that have more recent updates, might feel less clunky, like nobara, fedora, openSuse (the semi-rolling release version), garuda and PopOs.

Kdenlive works fine

You can try Fedora Atomic.
There's a project called universal-blue.org, which gives you a huge choice of available images, that all "just work".
I personally recommend the Silverblue version, since Gnome looks and behaves very professional. You can use KDE too if you like that more.

Here's a link to my post I made with more information on why you should choose an immutable distro: https://feddit.de/post/8234416

Btw, 8 GB of RAM isn't much for video editing. I recommend you to upgrade the RAM if you are able to.

Edit: maybe consider installing it on a second drive if you can. Even with better hardware than yours, VMs usually feel a bit clunky.

The most stable linux video editor is KdenLive, along possibly Shotcut. The distro doesn't matter much, as long as its underlying video libraries it ships with are stable versions. Most often, it's these libraries that crash, and not the editor on top. If these two programs don't work for you, I suggest you stay with Windows and use CapCut.

Olive is very ustable.

It might be helpful to get another ssd and install Linux on it. If you want to bail just swap back to your hold drive. See about going to 16gb ram while you're at it too.

Late to the party, but here is what I might add :

As others have mentioned, most distros will do, so just pick one that you think would suit you, or that you might like, or feel comfortable trying.

Regardless of what distro you go for though, you might wanna make sure you have h264 support and some extra codec packages to make sure you have compatibility with more audio/video formats, some don't have all of them preinstalled for different reasons and it might hurt your experience with editing.

Not a necessity, and may be not ideal since it can be difficult to use for some beginners, but a rolling release distro could also improve your editing experience simply because your system will be more up to date..except that's not a certainty and the difference might be too marginal to really notice..and using flatpak packages could be a simpler way to get more up to date stuff.

Regarding dual booting.. yeah it's not the best experience, but it's not that bad either. What it mostly means is you're gonna have to deal with a bunch of minor inconveniences (disk space management, disks opening in read only, windows update messing things up, one of the OS showing the wrong time,etc) , but adding all of them up could tire you at some point. And it can be worse if you are not sure the distro you installed suits you. If using a virtual machine is not great for you, you could try installing Linux on an external disk (although I haven't tried it myself so I don't know if it's easy to do), that way you could enjoy having both OS without having the worst issues you can sometimes have when dual booting. (myself I do the opposite, windows on external disk, but it's because I barely use windows)

Finally the program you use might matters still since some are more janky than others. If you want a simple editor Shotcut is a good option (like others pointed out), I'd argue Kdenlive is better but it's less intuitive, might require some fidling to work well on some hardware and overall it's more advanced (can be a good or a bad thing depending on what you do).

No clue if it was usefull and didn't expect it to be that long of a text, but here it is.

Just to say thank you for all messages!