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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

#81

Post by al_borland »

RadiozRadioz wrote: post #75
maples37 wrote: post #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.

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.

Alternativeto was a site I used to frequent, but after their redesign, it’s been pretty painful to use and a lot less valuable.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#83

Post by Grombobulous »

flaburgan wrote: post #71
Grombobulous wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 CarPla…

The 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.

Android 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.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#84

Post by heyoni »

cortesoft wrote: post #60
hiitsmyaccount wrote: post #23

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.

It’ll work tomorrow. It’s fine.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#85

Post by wredcoll »

hnlmorg wrote: post #51
buran77 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This is such a weird comment chain. Of course transcoding media is the easy part, ffmpeg exists. Even if it didn't, it would still be the easy part because you're just building computer algorithms that are like specified and defined and testable.

Making something that actually interacts with "the human world" is 100s of times harder than writing any kind of algorithm.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#86

Post by wredcoll »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #5
piaste wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> the vacuum of newer alternatives to the XBMC lineage all the more puzzling.

What is there to be puzzled about? Doing media transcoding is the easy part, dealing with humans is the hard part so.. programmers aren't rushing out to do it.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#87

Post by wredcoll »

jamesforestwest wrote: post #59

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.

Have you tried photoprism? I'm currently running it and trying to decide if it's worth swapping.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#88

Post by wredcoll »

moron4hire wrote: post #67
rpdillon wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, interesting. > No, to repeat what I said, I think "consistency" to a programmer is like "fairness" to a child I tend to pride myself on my ability to read and comprehend things, and I feel like I never saw you say this. I see now it was an edit to an earlier comment that I didn't catch the meaning of. It seems to say that you think consistency is childish, maybe because it's a naive ideal of some kind? I value it…

"you're advocating for projects that have wildly different coding styles from file to file and function to function?" I'm advocating for giving up in style as a thing you delude yourself into thinking matters. The opposite of "enforcing consistent style" is not "bedlam and mayhem." I'm saying just let people work on their things and focus on real metrics like testing and algorithmic analysis. This idea that code shou…

I'm not sure if I disagree with you or not, but this argument isn't very convincing.

> Consistent with what? As according to whom? For what purpose?

Consistent with.. itself! According to.. the people working on it! For the purpose of making it easier to read/write/understand!

Like, I'm willing to entertain arguments that it doesn't actually accomplish this, but these are questions with pretty obvious answers.

A lot of this conversation depends on the definition of "Style" we're using though.

I assumed it meant things like tabs/spaces/bracket placement/semicolon usage and so forth.

If you meant something much higher level, like, dunno, object orientation or what not, then that's an entirely different conversation.

As a side note, as long as we depend on extremely literal character by character diffing algorithms in order to display changes, code formatting is going to have some definite implications.

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#89

Post by wredcoll »

hnlmorg wrote: post #45
moron4hire wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know very well how opinionated other developers are. I'm explicitly saying it's a waste of energy to be that picky about code style. There is an easy to define line: there is no line. It's not a boundary where "over here is good code" and "over there, not" we just don't have a good idea of where the line is. No. There is absolutely no line.

> I know very well how opinionated other developers are. I'm explicitly saying it's a waste of energy to be that picky about code style. To be honest, I completely agree with you. The point I make is that not everyone would. And that disagreement alone results in a blurry line as to what some would consider important and what others would not. But personally, I honestly do wish more people had the same opinion as you…

I'm not going to argue about what style is best like whether or not tabs are superior to spaces or if you should cuddle your elses (other than for my own amusement of course), I just want there to be a style, singular, that the whole project uses. It's nicer that way.

Like, I certainly could finish a book where they changed which font/size they were using every chapter or whatever, but why would I want this?

Re: A website for debloated open source alternatives

#90

Post by wredcoll »

ad_fontes wrote: post #16
yannoninator wrote: post #7

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?

Software 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)

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