A website for debloated open source alternatives

Not able to access the site on Firefox "Error Code: SSL_ERROR_INTERNAL_ERROR_ALERT"

	▲	JoshTriplett 2 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Same, it's not just you. I'm wondering if this is an exotic symptom of the site running out of capacity.
	▲	theandrewbailey 5 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Same on Chromium-based browsers.

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reconnecting an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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hnlmorg 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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?

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piaste an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

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intelkishan an hour ago | parent | next [-]

What did the ebook space change into?

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hnlmorg an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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?

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metek 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

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.

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hnlmorg 29 minutes ago | parent [-]

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.

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rpdillon 15 minutes ago | parent [-]

Do you still maintain it?

	▲	hnlmorg 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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cosmic_cheese an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You know that recent social media trend where you name 100 women? Try naming 100 ffmpeg command line options.

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WalterGR an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How is “bloat” measured here? Or is this simply a list of open source alternatives to commercial products?

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joshuat an hour ago | parent [-]

The inclusion of Tailscale here was a little surprising to me. I'm betting on the latter.

	▲	ad_fontes 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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flaburgan 9 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I want a debloated (electric) car.

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tech_army 5 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I first thought I’m on old eBay webpage lol

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ranger_danger an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I like the retro ebay style page design.

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sam_lowry_ an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

suckless.org?

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moron4hire an hour ago | parent | next [-]

"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!"

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hnlmorg an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

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moron4hire 18 minutes ago | parent [-]

I 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 13 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I 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.
	▲	hnlmorg 13 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think you’re underestimating how opinionated developers are. The fact that we are disagreeing on this point is great evidence that there isn’t an easy to define, proverbial line in the sand.

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tokai 24 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Actually think the suckless people would hate this. Google login and nothing there looks light weight in the suckless spirit.

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yannoninator an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Is there a marker to know if any of these tools are AI generated slop here?

That would be a good feature here.

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ad_fontes an hour ago | parent [-]

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?

	▲	rpdillon 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.