debloat.dev: A Directory of Open-Source Replacements for Bloatware
A website for debloated open source alternatives
debloat.dev is a curated directory that pairs popular proprietary software with open-source alternatives, aiming to help users replace vendor bloatware. It lists projects like ckb-next for Corsair iCUE, scanservjs for HP Smart, and ESPHome for Tuya cloud firmware, each with license info, ratings, and discussion threads. The site also highlights most-discussed projects such as Home Assistant, Jellyfin, and Syncthing, making it a valuable resource for those seeking to debloat their digital lives.
debloat.dev — replace the junk
- maples37
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.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7
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, 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
- hiitsmyaccount
Not able to access the site on Firefox "Error Code: SSL_ERROR_INTERNAL_ERROR_ALERT"
- reconnecting
Sign in with Google or Github only? No, thank you.
- Grombobulous
Cool site, though browsing through “most popular” I absolutely wouldn’t call Nextcloud “debloated.”
- hnlmorg
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?
- WalterGR
How is “bloat” measured here? Or is this simply a list of open source alternatives to commercial products?
- hinkley
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.