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Posted by ryanvogel 4 hours ago

A website for debloated open source alternatives(debloat.dev)
199 points | 74 comments
maples37 1 hour ago|
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.
RadiozRadioz 27 minutes ago||
Some 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 9 minutes ago||
Seems 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.
bdlowery 2 minutes ago||
i've found this site easier to use and have better results than alternativeto. https://openalternative.co/
hiitsmyaccount 2 hours ago||
Not able to access the site on Firefox "Error Code: SSL_ERROR_INTERNAL_ERROR_ALERT"
cortesoft 1 hour ago||
Seems to be overloaded.

I wonder if the site needs a bit more bloat to handle the load, or a bit less.

EvilGoose 35 minutes ago|||
Same, works on Chromium but not Firefox.
JoshTriplett 2 hours ago|||
Same, it's not just you. I'm wondering if this is an exotic symptom of the site running out of capacity.
kmstout 1 hour ago|||
Same here, but it works on chromium, eww and lynx.
cortesoft 1 hour ago||
Failing on chrome for me. I dont think it is a browser issue, but is a load issue
sudo_cowsay 2 hours ago|||
Same, bitdefender blocked me
theandrewbailey 2 hours ago||
Same on Chromium-based browsers.
Grombobulous 1 hour ago||
Cool site, though browsing through “most popular” I absolutely wouldn’t call Nextcloud “debloated.”
reconnecting 3 hours ago||
Sign in with Google or Github only? No, thank you.
water-drummer 2 hours ago|
The irony is strong with this one
hinkley 1 hour ago||
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.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1 hour ago||
FWIW, 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

This results in a 1.9MB HTML file

eterm 37 minutes ago|
I 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?

hnlmorg 4 hours ago||
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?

piaste 4 hours ago|
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.

intelkishan 3 hours ago|||
What did the ebook space change into?
hnlmorg 3 hours ago||||
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?

buran77 2 hours ago|||
> It’s not that difficult to be honest.

Sounds easy if all you have to do is write a short comment about it. People who actually did it, like the recently retired lead of the Jellyfin project, didn't make it sound like it's "not that difficult" [1].

If you want ot vibe code a project for yourself it's probably reasonable amount of effort. But if you want to build a product, something with polish, something not held together by spit and scotch tape, something reliable, it won't be easy.

[1] https://forum.jellyfin.org/t-project-leadership-changes

hnlmorg 2 hours ago||
[dead]
JoshTriplett 2 hours ago||||
I would love to see an Open Source media center that supports streaming services. I wouldn't care if the services say "we only support 1080p for browsers / open source, anything more needs a locked-down device". (Perhaps the project could have some add-on you can buy that's a physical hardware dongle for doing 4k HDR and emitting HDCPed HDMI.) I already live with that for watching on my laptop. Just having watchable basic-resolution streaming would make it a one-stop-shop.
hnlmorg 31 minutes ago|||
The issue is many streaming services require DRM in the browser.

I can’t recall if Chromium supports that, I have a feeling Google only include that DRM in Chrome. But if it is available in Chromium then you might be able to build an Electron app.

MostlyStable 2 hours ago|||
If streaming through a browser/open source / not the locked down app supported 1080p I would be a lot happier. My understanding from the last time i looked is that it actually only supports 720p
JoshTriplett 2 hours ago|||
Would still live with that, to have a single system that's no worse than my laptop.
gspr 1 hour ago|||
You can coax Netflix into giving you 1080p in ordinary Firefox by setting the right user-agent. That's good enough for me, and if it stops working I'll be motivated to stop paying those assholes anyway.
metek 3 hours ago|||
I think I understand how to use about 20 of the command line options for ffmpeg and the companion utilities like ffprobe. Which is to say; I understand about 0.5% of the total options they provide and am likely a world leading expert in it. I'm mostly joking -- as in, overstating how many of them I understand.

Understanding ffmpeg borders on a specialization in itself. No big surprise that so many of the alternatives have fallen away over the years as people realize the absolute scope of that piece of software.

hnlmorg 3 hours ago|||
You don’t need to understand much of ffmpeg to build a media centre. Your requirements here are extremely simplified and there are hundreds of guides online on how to use it for very simple transcoding.

But if you don’t want to use ffmpeg directly then use one of the many ffmpeg wrappers. Or a different lib entirely like gstreamer or VLC.

Around 15 years ago I built a media centre for my car and the media playback part turned out to be the easiest part of the project.

rpdillon 2 hours ago||
Do you still maintain it?
hnlmorg 2 hours ago||
No. It was built before Android / Apple integrations existed and was built around tactile controls and voice interactions. But I think Apple Car play is a far far more useful product these days than anything I built 15 years ago. Even if their touch controls are an ergonomic step backwards.
0x457 2 hours ago|||
i had media center powered by a few perl script that would transcode all videos into formats that ps3 supported in 2007-ish. Yes ffmpeg had a lot of options, 99% of them does not matter, there really only 3 ways to stream to client: as is, repack streams into something client support (i.e. your source is mkv) or transcode into something client support (clients know which formats they support).

People that run these services don't want "dynamic stream quality selection".

cosmic_cheese 4 hours ago|||
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.

metek 3 hours ago||
You know that recent social media trend where you name 100 women? Try naming 100 ffmpeg command line options.
cosmic_cheese 1 hour ago||
ffmpeg 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.
WalterGR 4 hours ago||
How is “bloat” measured here? Or is this simply a list of open source alternatives to commercial products?
joshuat 3 hours ago|
The inclusion of Tailscale here was a little surprising to me. I'm betting on the latter.
ad_fontes 3 hours ago||
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.

Grombobulous 1 hour ago|||
To 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 1 hour 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.

KronisLV 1 hour ago||
Someone should add Kanboard for project management tools (like Trello): https://kanboard.org/

Really lightweight and nice!

jamesforestwest 1 hour ago|
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.
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