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A website for debloated open source alternatives

debloat.dev

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Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#51
post #48
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’…

> 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…

I did write a media centre around 15 years ago. What that link you shared describes is the very real toll that maintaining an open source project demands. Not the specific complexities of transcoding multimedia.

From personal experience, the transcoding was the easy part. Building a UX that was intuitive and a backend that catalogued the media accurately required far more attention.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#52
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.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#54
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You know that recent social media trend where you name 100 women? Try naming 100 ffmpeg command line options.

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.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#56
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

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.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#58
post #57

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

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
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