I've been a big fan of https://alternativeto.net/ and using their "open source" and "self-hosted" filters. Even looking through the non-FOSS alternatives for a particular application/site can be helpful; sometimes a for-profit company will take a different approach to solving a problem and it will give me other ideas to consider.
FWIW, this site is fast, works perfectly with a text-only browser, e.g., links (1.4MB static binary), elinks, or without a (blooated) browser, e.g., retrieve all the pages, catenate and read as a single HTML file or convert it to, e.g., SQL, CSV or a plain text file
All the /p/ URLs are in the sitemap, all the site's pages can be retrieved over a single TCP connection
I think in general maintainers would be better served by declaring Performance is a Feature earlier in their projects and rejecting contributions that add surface area to the API at the expense of throughput on the existing surface area.
Wrapping modules to expose additional functionality for a niche in a problem domain is tricky. You will end up with some code duplication and some predictability issues with your timelines, but the end result will be better for it.
Long ago someone convinced me that 'Strangling a Service' could also be applied to APIs. The base
module should be as simple as possible but no simpler, and more esoteric features should be shunted off to another module. And then in the case when features are antagonistic to each other, they can live in parallel in separate wrappers.
The tricky part there is writing unit tests in the base to defend the negative space that these
features fit into. This feature depends on an invariant in the base API that will break everything if merged.
I think it's just a pretty consolidated space? Kind of like ebook management, which was dominated by Calibre for so many years (this changed recently).
But unlike ebooks, media centre management is a fair bit more complex since it involves supporting many different media formats and many forms of acceleration or transcoding.
So the big projects - Kodi for local media and Jellyfin for streaming - have a lot of inertia because they tend to support whatever you throw at them.
It’s not that difficult to be honest. VLC / ffmpeg can do most of the heavy lifting. And there’s no shortage of libraries for rendering in a UI.
There used to be dozens of options to choose from. Multiple different XBMC forks. Multiples different Subsonic forks. Multiple different DNLA servers. Multitudes of web-based servers. CLI MP3 servers. Independent media centres for a variety of different consoles.
Maybe that’s still available and just not indexed on that site. But I noticed the choices had shrank significantly last year when I was looking for Plex alternatives compared with when I last built a media centre approximately 15 years ago.
Maybe smart TVs have reduced people’s desire here?
It's logical, but the low variety is disappointing nonetheless and makes it more likely than none of the available options are well-suited to one's needs/desires.
In the case of media management, ffmpeg is easily usable with just about every programming language in existence and its usage is extremely well-trodden at this point, which makes the vacuum of newer alternatives to the XBMC lineage all the more puzzling.
I like Tailscale, but it's difficult to argue with a straight face that it's not seriously suffered from product creep.
This is the inherent problem with tech start-ups. Once they solve the problem they were founded to solve, then what? It's feature complete, but investors insist that the line must go up. Can you imagine if `sed` or `vim` was brought to market by a venture-backed company?
IMHO, capitalism and FOSS are fundamentally incompatible.
Nice collection. I've been using some of these for a while, G-Helper is a lifesaver if you own an Asus laptop and Immich is probably the best Google Photos replacement out there right now.
There are a lot of electric cars that are relatively normal, usually from more traditional auto manufacturers.
Toyota bZ/bZ Woodland, the entire Hyundai/Kia lineup, Honda Prologue, Jaguar i-pace, original Audi e-tron
I haven’t seen the newer Nissan infotainment system, not sure about that one.
Are these without tech? No, not at all, but they do have fast and simple interfaces that are designed to dump you into CarPlay/Android Auto with ease, and a good amount of them retain separated climate controls that live outside the screen.
Obviously if you want something like a 2008 Accord that’s not really going to be a thing, but almost everyone who isn’t Tesla or Rivian is surprisingly conventional. If you haven’t done much EV shopping and your impression of EVs is “they’re all like Tesla where everything is in the screen” that isn’t true at all. For example, Kia/Hyundai EV models have absolutely zero difference between the gas models and EVs in terms of control design. Toyota’s latest infotainment system is as basic and straightforward as it gets.
I find stuff like this hilarious. No software project has ever failed, or even slow down one iota, because of the comment style. This is just someone's personal "ick" masquerading as "coding standards."
EDIT: I think it has actually been becoming a dad of two boys that has absolutely killed my patience for this kind of thing. A lot of it is so similar to how my children argue with each other over absolutely trivial things. Add in the way they say "I don't like that" as "that's not fair" (my children) or "that's not consistent" (the bike shedding nerds) and it just makes me want to scream, "stop whining!"
Whilst I do agree with you on that specific example, it’s worth noting that code standards as a whole are a somewhat blurry line that can be extremely subjective at times.
Here we go: as soon as you ask for any kind of definition or rigor around AI development, people will work hard to shut you up.
You're asking an extremely reasonable question, IMHO, especially given these are projects with limited resources going up against generally larger, better-resourced projects. AI is an obvious point of leverage in such a situation, and so there is a lot of potential to reverse engineer using AI and get good results.
What all of these requests fundamentally come down to is "How are you filtering for quality?", which is an extremely difficult question given the state of, for example, the app stores.
I've been a big fan of https://alternativeto.net/ and using their "open source" and "self-hosted" filters. Even looking through the non-FOSS alternatives for a particular application/site can be helpful; sometimes a for-profit company will take a different approach to solving a problem and it will give me other ideas to consider.
FWIW, this site is fast, works perfectly with a text-only browser, e.g., links (1.4MB static binary), elinks, or without a (blooated) browser, e.g., retrieve all the pages, catenate and read as a single HTML file or convert it to, e.g., SQL, CSV or a plain text file
All the /p/ URLs are in the sitemap, all the site's pages can be retrieved over a single TCP connection
https://debloat.dev/sitemap.xml
This results in a 1.9MB HTML file
I think in general maintainers would be better served by declaring Performance is a Feature earlier in their projects and rejecting contributions that add surface area to the API at the expense of throughput on the existing surface area.
Wrapping modules to expose additional functionality for a niche in a problem domain is tricky. You will end up with some code duplication and some predictability issues with your timelines, but the end result will be better for it.
Long ago someone convinced me that 'Strangling a Service' could also be applied to APIs. The base module should be as simple as possible but no simpler, and more esoteric features should be shunted off to another module. And then in the case when features are antagonistic to each other, they can live in parallel in separate wrappers.
The tricky part there is writing unit tests in the base to defend the negative space that these features fit into. This feature depends on an invariant in the base API that will break everything if merged.
Not able to access the site on Firefox "Error Code: SSL_ERROR_INTERNAL_ERROR_ALERT"
Seems to be overloaded.
I wonder if the site needs a bit more bloat to handle the load, or a bit less.
Same, it's not just you. I'm wondering if this is an exotic symptom of the site running out of capacity.
Same here, but it works on chromium, eww and lynx.
Failing on chrome for me. I dont think it is a browser issue, but is a load issue
Same, bitdefender blocked me
Same on Chromium-based browsers.
Cool site, though browsing through “most popular” I absolutely wouldn’t call Nextcloud “debloated.”
Sign in with Google or Github only? No, thank you.
The irony is strong with this one
In the TV and Media section (https://debloat.dev/c/tv-media) there are 11 recommendations and 4 of them are XBMC.
There used to be so many options for media centres. What happened?
I think it's just a pretty consolidated space? Kind of like ebook management, which was dominated by Calibre for so many years (this changed recently).
But unlike ebooks, media centre management is a fair bit more complex since it involves supporting many different media formats and many forms of acceleration or transcoding.
So the big projects - Kodi for local media and Jellyfin for streaming - have a lot of inertia because they tend to support whatever you throw at them.
What did the ebook space change into?
It’s not that difficult to be honest. VLC / ffmpeg can do most of the heavy lifting. And there’s no shortage of libraries for rendering in a UI.
There used to be dozens of options to choose from. Multiple different XBMC forks. Multiples different Subsonic forks. Multiple different DNLA servers. Multitudes of web-based servers. CLI MP3 servers. Independent media centres for a variety of different consoles.
Maybe that’s still available and just not indexed on that site. But I noticed the choices had shrank significantly last year when I was looking for Plex alternatives compared with when I last built a media centre approximately 15 years ago.
Maybe smart TVs have reduced people’s desire here?
11 replies →
It's logical, but the low variety is disappointing nonetheless and makes it more likely than none of the available options are well-suited to one's needs/desires.
In the case of media management, ffmpeg is easily usable with just about every programming language in existence and its usage is extremely well-trodden at this point, which makes the vacuum of newer alternatives to the XBMC lineage all the more puzzling.
2 replies →
Someone should add Kanboard for project management tools (like Trello): https://kanboard.org/
Really lightweight and nice!
How is “bloat” measured here? Or is this simply a list of open source alternatives to commercial products?
The inclusion of Tailscale here was a little surprising to me. I'm betting on the latter.
I like Tailscale, but it's difficult to argue with a straight face that it's not seriously suffered from product creep.
This is the inherent problem with tech start-ups. Once they solve the problem they were founded to solve, then what? It's feature complete, but investors insist that the line must go up. Can you imagine if `sed` or `vim` was brought to market by a venture-backed company?
IMHO, capitalism and FOSS are fundamentally incompatible.
2 replies →
Nice collection. I've been using some of these for a while, G-Helper is a lifesaver if you own an Asus laptop and Immich is probably the best Google Photos replacement out there right now.
Website doesnt connect for me.
I want a debloated (electric) car.
There are a lot of electric cars that are relatively normal, usually from more traditional auto manufacturers.
Toyota bZ/bZ Woodland, the entire Hyundai/Kia lineup, Honda Prologue, Jaguar i-pace, original Audi e-tron
I haven’t seen the newer Nissan infotainment system, not sure about that one.
Are these without tech? No, not at all, but they do have fast and simple interfaces that are designed to dump you into CarPlay/Android Auto with ease, and a good amount of them retain separated climate controls that live outside the screen.
Obviously if you want something like a 2008 Accord that’s not really going to be a thing, but almost everyone who isn’t Tesla or Rivian is surprisingly conventional. If you haven’t done much EV shopping and your impression of EVs is “they’re all like Tesla where everything is in the screen” that isn’t true at all. For example, Kia/Hyundai EV models have absolutely zero difference between the gas models and EVs in terms of control design. Toyota’s latest infotainment system is as basic and straightforward as it gets.
Slate? Or just remove the cellular modem from a Tesla and you have a more or less "dumb" car.
I find my Mii Electric qualifies.
I like the retro ebay style page design.
suckless.org?
"Use /* */ for comments, not //."
I find stuff like this hilarious. No software project has ever failed, or even slow down one iota, because of the comment style. This is just someone's personal "ick" masquerading as "coding standards."
EDIT: I think it has actually been becoming a dad of two boys that has absolutely killed my patience for this kind of thing. A lot of it is so similar to how my children argue with each other over absolutely trivial things. Add in the way they say "I don't like that" as "that's not fair" (my children) or "that's not consistent" (the bike shedding nerds) and it just makes me want to scream, "stop whining!"
Whilst I do agree with you on that specific example, it’s worth noting that code standards as a whole are a somewhat blurry line that can be extremely subjective at times.
9 replies →
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Actually think the suckless people would hate this. Google login and nothing there looks light weight in the suckless spirit.
I mean, if the suckless crowd were actually serious they'd offer their website only in gopher or something like that instead of bloated HTML (/s)
Something seems not right with that website, even aside from the SSL problem.
I first thought I’m on old eBay webpage lol
this website is so old school
Is there a marker to know if any of these tools are AI generated slop here?
That would be a good feature here.
How do you define "AI generated slop"?
There's also an implicit judgment in your question. Is well-designed, well-tested AI-generated code worse than poorly written, but hand-typed code?
Here we go: as soon as you ask for any kind of definition or rigor around AI development, people will work hard to shut you up.
You're asking an extremely reasonable question, IMHO, especially given these are projects with limited resources going up against generally larger, better-resourced projects. AI is an obvious point of leverage in such a situation, and so there is a lot of potential to reverse engineer using AI and get good results.
What all of these requests fundamentally come down to is "How are you filtering for quality?", which is an extremely difficult question given the state of, for example, the app stores.
1 reply →