I'm not trying to be mean here, but if I'm reading the meaning of this post correctly, it feels like you really haven't dived that far into open source. There are thousands of FOSS projects that do exactly as you say, and yes, some get branded and bloated.

But like... that doesn't mean that what is out there needs to strip away anything. It just means that you have to keep looking and possibly contributing even if its just reporting bugs.

For example, Firefox. Have you even checked around? Falkon, Qutebrowser, Ladybird (still in alpha), Nyxt; there's a handful of QTWebEngine browsers already doing just fine. Not to mention the plethora of stripped down Firefox forks for both desktop and Android like Fennec, Ironfox, Floorp, Firedragon, and Zen. There's also a stripped down base Chromium browser, which I believe is de-Googled.

I'm just not quite sure what you want to achieve here.

I don't get it

The true strength is in the open interfaces and common protocols that enable competition and choice, followed by the free-to-use libraries that establish a foundation upon which we can build and iterate. This helps us to stay in control of our hardware, our data, and our destiny.

Practically speaking, there is often more value in releasing something as free software than there is to commercialising it or otherwise tightly controlling the source code... and for these smaller tools and libraries it is especially the case.

Many bigger projects (eg. linux kernel, firefox, kubernetes, apache*) help set the direction of entire industries, building new opportunities as they go, thanks to the standardization that comes from their popularity.

It's also a reason why many companies release software as open source too, especially in the early days, establishing themselves as THE leader...for a while at least (eg. Docker Inc, Hashicorp).

Can you give some examples of your point?

learning to use a workshop has nothing to do with how the tools are constructed. open source means very little to people who are not familiar with software tools, and is not likely to get someone started.

as soon as you are even starting on an intermediate level you need to care a lot, because you start building your own tools. but before that point, open source just means the big players. good luck explaining the benefits of awk before they know the difference between office and openoffice.

I know its super in-fashion to shit on the concept of "vibe coding" but I really do wish there was a more boilerplate way to remove having to worry about designing the UI/UX so I could focus on getting the MVP functionality down and having it relatively neatly display, more akin to designing a form or Apple Shortcut.

I have tons of forms I've designed that are basically de facto programs that I can whip up super easily and just pick the data "type" for each "line" of the form which essentialky equates to a line or block of code in a code program. Decent looking enough, interactive, can easily high-level edit and tweak shit and test it to make sure it mostly fool-proof produces the outputs that are needed.

Whenever I think of all the graphical and UI and UX stuff that has to go into making a viable app I get so discouraged, I hate having to think about all that stuff and the geeking around to make it functional let alone aesthetic

Maybe put more thought into this because misspelling in the title and throughout your handful of sentences doesn’t help your weak point.

Of course, most FOSS is small. One of the original goals of FOSS software was to be small and do one job well. Open the gnome software store and it’s all descriptive.

It’s easy to make a claim if you don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe go explore more examples beyond the three you discount lol