8 ms·
A website for debloated open source alternatives
- WalterGR 1mo agoHow is “bloat” measured here? Or is this simply a list of open source alternatives to commercial products?
- joshuat 1mo agoThe inclusion of Tailscale here was a little surprising to me. I'm betting on the latter.
- ad_fontes 1mo agoI 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.
- Grombobulous 1mo agoTo be fair to tailscale, I think all the feature creep is stuff that enterprises actually need to have solved. Without it it’s a product that 99% of users would just use free tier and never pay a dime for. Perhaps it would have been better to split the product into a simple consumer thing and then a separate enterprise product suite.
- arcfour 1mo ago> IMHO, capitalism and FOSS are fundamentally incompatible. A bold statement to make given the world we live in today contains plenty of both, working together, in harmony.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- nativeit 1mo agoThat’s [part of] what regulatory frameworks are supposed to accomplish: minimize and compensate for capitalism’s excesses. A free market can do a lot of very impressive things with surprising efficiency, but it fails on a number of things societies value, FOSS included. IMHO, there should be more robust publicly funded support for license enforcement, facilitated access to forming charitable/non-profit organizations, subsidized grants/loans, and something akin to the Public Broadcasting Service, but for the internet. Sort of like a national intranet, with federated social media, web archives, public service portals, email, digital asset storage, and software development and distribution resources. But that’s just my democratic socialist head-canon. No doubt such a system would be incredibly difficult to implement, and come with any number of unintended consequences that, for the purposes of this discussion, I chose to ignore. It’s also worth noting that there are several of those things in the USA’s federal government already: you can find open source software repositories for a number of federal agencies, like NASA and the NSA (which includes several fun projects).
- pitop64 1mo ago[flagged]
- hnlmorg 1mo agoIn the TV and Media section (https://debloat.dev/c/tv-media 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?
- piaste 1mo agoI 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.
- cosmic_cheese 1mo agoIt'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.
- metek 1mo agoYou know that recent social media trend where you name 100 women? Try naming 100 ffmpeg command line options.
- cosmic_cheese 1mo agoffmpeg is a beast, not gonna argue that. As another commenter noted however, only a small fraction of those options are necessary to cover a media center project, especially if you're not beholden to supporting esoteric/archaic formats, aren’t bothered with trying to make broken/corrupted files play, etc. Being willing to specialize can also help reduce scope.
- sam_lowry_ 1mo agosuckless.org?
- moron4hire 1mo ago"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!"
- hnlmorg 1mo agoWhilst 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.
- moron4hire 1mo agoI actually don't think it's worth noting. I think, if a particular code standard issue is really of value, it will be obvious. You will propose it and nobody will argue. I think the fact that code standards are contentious is proof they are extremely low value. Subtle effects are indistinguishable from superstition.
- rpdillon 1mo agoI think the particular choice of coding standards is low value, but I think the consistency they bring has a lot of value, at least potentially. As a father of two boys myself, I know exactly where you're coming from. Like some adults, they'll argue over pointless details and miss the entire thrust of the discussion.
- yannoninator 1mo agoIs there a marker to know if any of these tools are AI generated slop here? That would be a good feature here.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- ad_fontes 1mo agoHow 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?
- rpdillon 1mo agoHere 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.
- matheusmoreira 1mo ago> 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. Heh. I was essentially run out of lobsters for repeatedly asking that question. Not even kidding. At some point I became the second most flagged user in the entire forum. The site itself invited me to delete my account. After a while I simply asked Claude to define "slop" and posted the answer. To this day it's still the only coherent definition of "slop" in the entire site.
- wredcoll 1mo agoSoftware was never that different but everyone is definitely now realizing that, like all the other creative type things humans produce, the trick isn't finding one, it's finding a good one. AI involvement is a possible heuristic but I seriously doubt it's all that useful for software (probably works a lot better for books)
- reconnecting 1mo agoSign in with Google or Github only? No, thank you.
- water-drummer 1mo agoThe irony is strong with this one
- jordiburgos 1mo agoWhich ones would be cool to use?
- reconnecting 1mo agoEmail.
- inigyou 1mo agoSite-local username and password
- nativeit 1mo agoNone at all.
- ranger_danger 1mo agoI like the retro ebay style page design.
- hiitsmyaccount 1mo agoNot able to access the site on Firefox "Error Code: SSL_ERROR_INTERNAL_ERROR_ALERT"
- JoshTriplett 1mo agoSame, it's not just you. I'm wondering if this is an exotic symptom of the site running out of capacity.
- hackernud3s 1mo agoThat's exotic to you?
- KennyBlanken 1mo agoYes? That SSL error is not remotely common when a site is hugged to death?
- theandrewbailey 1mo agoSame on Chromium-based browsers.
- sudo_cowsay 1mo agoSame, bitdefender blocked me
- kmstout 1mo agoSame here, but it works on chromium, eww and lynx.
- cortesoft 1mo agoFailing on chrome for me. I dont think it is a browser issue, but is a load issue
- cortesoft 1mo agoSeems to be overloaded. I wonder if the site needs a bit more bloat to handle the load, or a bit less.
- flaburgan 1mo agoI want a debloated (electric) car.
- drnick1 1mo agoSlate? Or just remove the cellular modem from a Tesla and you have a more or less "dumb" car.
- Grombobulous 1mo agoThere 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.
- flaburgan 1mo agoThe only electric car that I drove was a Peugeot 208e. I liked it a lot, but just the fact that the car has a SIM card with 4G connection is already weird for me. Why would my car connect to the internet? I also have doubts about the GPS... And I absolutely do not want Android Auto. Anything related to Google or any GAFAM is a big no for me.
- Grombobulous 1mo agoAndroid Auto (and, similarly, Apple CarPlay) isn’t by itself any form of draconian Google data collection, you can really think of it as a second screen mirroring car-oriented user interface for Android OS. It is almost 100% equivalent to connecting a second monitor to a laptop, but with a car UI. You can use Android Auto without any sort of internet connection with offline maps, perhaps an app utilizing OpenStreetMaps. There is no prerequisite to sign your life away to Google or have them collect tons of data from you to use it. As far as cars having cellular modems, yeah, I guess I’m not a fan of not having the choice to buy new cars without them, but usually they are there for pretty logical reasons. The car manufacturer infotainment system usually has its own software with online-enabled maps and apps, which some people prefer, I guess. Believe it or not, Rivian has a complete global off switch for data collection, although it disables features like adaptive cruise control. Still, you’d probably be the type to not mind losing that as a trade-off. There definitely needs to be more privacy legislation surrounding automotive technology, for sure. However, our original topic here was “bloat,” which in the context of automotive technology I take to mean “overbearing software and a lack of intuitive controls for automotive functions.” For me, if a car has separate climate controls, turn signal stalks, non-haptic steering wheel buttons, and a volume knob, and the screen isn’t wildly laggy, I’m good.
- tech_army 1mo agoI first thought I’m on old eBay webpage lol
- josteink 1mo agoSame here. I’m guessing that’s not accidental.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- tonyhart7 1mo agothis website is so old school
- shevy-java 1mo agoSomething seems not right with that website, even aside from the SSL problem.
- maples37 1mo agoI've been a big fan of https://alternativeto.net/ 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.
- RadiozRadioz 1mo agoSome of the information on there is useful, but I'd say that alternativeto.net is an almost perfect example of a bloaty & hostile website. OP's website is much more pleasant.
- bluebarbet 1mo agoSeems it's always the same trade-off: either a commercial site with an opaque business model, or a weekend passion project which might go away when the hobbyist in question finds they have other (or more lucrative) things to do.
- al_borland 1mo agoAlternativeto was a site I used to frequent, but after their redesign, it’s been pretty painful to use and a lot less valuable.
- stanislavb 1mo agoSaaSHub founder here. Have you tried https://www.saashub.com https://www.saashub.com? It has both "open-source alternatives" and "EU Alternatives".
- al_borland 1mo agoIn most cases I’m looking for alternatives to local apps, rather than a SaaS offering.
- Anamon 1mo ago
- newsomix9xl 1mo agoWebsite doesnt connect for me.
- Grombobulous 1mo agoCool site, though browsing through “most popular” I absolutely wouldn’t call Nextcloud “debloated.”
- a96 1mo agoWhile I kind of agree, is there a more debloated replacement?
- GoblinSlayer 1mo agoopenssh?
- Grombobulous 1mo agoIt’s hard to pinpoint one single replacement because nextcloud is a huge suite of cloud apps. So it depends which apps in the stack you’re looking to replace.
- mixmastamyk 1mo agohttps://github.com/opencloud-eu https://github.com/opencloud-eu Opencloud is a nextcloud analog rewritten in golang.
- jamesforestwest 1mo agoNice 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.
- wredcoll 1mo agoHave you tried photoprism? I'm currently running it and trying to decide if it's worth swapping.
- KronisLV 1mo agoSomeone should add Kanboard for project management tools (like Trello): https://kanboard.org/ https://kanboard.org/ Really lightweight and nice!
- hinkley 1mo agoI 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.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1mo agoFWIW, this site is fast, works perfectly with a text-only browser, e.g., links (1.4MB static binary), elinks, or without a (bloated?) 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 https://debloat.dev/sitemap.xml This, i.e., retrieving all 200 /p/ URLs over a single TCP connection (using HTTP/1.1 pipelining), results in a 1.9MB HTML file comprising all the /p/ pages, including response headers. NB. This isn't "crawling". All URLs (cf. a set of "seed" URLs) are known before the connection is made No cookies, no Javascript Other than CSS, no bloat NB. A 1.9MB sitemap would not be large. For example, here is a 2.9MB sitemap from AP https://apnews.com/ap-sitemap-202607.xml https://apnews.com/ap-sitemap-202607.xml
- eterm 1mo agoI about to splutter that 1.9MB is a huge sitemap, but it's 12kB. Do you mean crawling the entire sitemap and concatenating the results is 1.9MB?
- varun_ch 1mo agoAlso, the website seems to be largely ‘vibe coded’, at least given by the written copy and the style. If you ask Claude to use 1990s/2000s web design and HTML it’ll do something like this.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1mo ago
- ltbarcly3 1mo agosite is down. debloated too much
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- butz 1mo agotinyapps.org is worth a mention too, if anyone does not know about it :)
- stanislavb 1mo agoIt's surprising how pleasant to browse this project is.
- HugoTea 1mo agoIs this site opensource? It's beautiful I kind've want one
- vitalnodo 1mo agoA lot of alternatives can be found at https://github.com/mayfrost/guides/blob/master/ALTERNATIVES.md https://github.com/mayfrost/guides/blob/master/ALTERNATIVES....
- hadestructhor 1mo agoTaking the opportunity to plug my own recent project: canireplaceit.com You can see some collection, and I'm building some advanced research capabilities to it. For now, you can see if you can fully replace an app with a sub, with oss alternatives, or free alternatives. Heavily vibe coded but all the apps out there didn't have what I needed, a list of features, what exactly is missing, if there is an sso tax or not, licenses, cheaper alternatives, if there are some tjat genuinely can't be replaced and why. Lemme know what you think about it and what I should add to it
- gigabyte9592 1mo agoCategory selection should be checkboxes, not a text box.