this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2025
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I just wanted to compare FOSS Linux budgeting software (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by Thorned_Rose@sh.itjust.works to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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Instead YouTube gives me literally nothing but AI spam. :/

I scrolled down a bit more and got this: https://i.postimg.cc/fJcPhG45/Screenshot-20251118-150802.png

Scrolled down some more and this: https://i.postimg.cc/v1khnhRp/Screenshot-20251118-151325.png

I kept scrolling until I ran out of relevant results. Not a single video was legit. I don't think I've ever seen so much AI slop in one search term and by the gods there is a lot of crap on YouTube.

Anyone have a good comparison video? I'm just wanting a decent comparison of Actual, Firefly III and possibly HomeBank. Feel free to also give me your 2 cents on whatever you use :)

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[–] dx1@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

We need platforms where AI content is just banned. We're past the point we need to start systematically excluding all this crap.

[–] atmorous@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

We need more PeerTube devs to develop it further

Also to switch everybody to Vanillo (not open source but definitely a way better alternative)

Best if they make it so there is no AI Content allowed too or at very least segmented away from human content

[–] aaronhooper@retrolemmy.com 3 points 1 day ago

I remember back in the day using gnucash but I'm sure there are better alternatives on awesome-selfhosted, if you want to go that route. I imagine a raspberry pi or some low power hardware can also run those. They're great because they're not platform dependent. Docker might be a hurdle though

[–] LiveLM@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago

This "culture" of stealing video titles, thumbnails and even entire ideas wholesale has been going for a while on Youtube, unfortunately.

[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Just FYI, take a look at how YNAB works — which is a paid app, but with a great approach: you track your spending for a while, and then basically always know how much you can spend on various categories of things. Idk what the workflow is in modern budgeting apps, but back in the day YNAB was rather different from the more typical accounting-type software like GNUCash. One of its tenets is that you don't spend money which you don't actually have, i.e. the credit card debt.

[–] sunbeam60@feddit.uk 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Actual Budget is a straight FOSS clone of YNAB. It’s very, very good IMHO, but their big selling feature was bank import with PSD2 APIs across the EU and they’ve backed away from that as you need to be a commercial provider to use APIs directly and their dependency on GoCardless is getting nerfed.

[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Thanks, but as a non-quite-EU person I'd like you to know I understood your comment fine until a bit after the second comma in the second sentence, following which my grokking declined sharply to just the surface level when met with a bunch of peculiar terms forming a mighty wall of obstruction to my comprehending.

[–] sunbeam60@feddit.uk 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The EU has instigated the Payment Service Directive 2 (the previous one being PSD1). This requires that all EU banks over a certain size provide APIs to access transactions and other data.

However banks are required to set strict requirements to use their APIs, including requiring lots of knowledge and a documented approval chain that pertains to each user. In practice this means only other big companies have access and most have solved it by buying the “access account and transaction data” service from a third party company.

GoCardless is one such company. They previously had a developer tier that you could sign up to, which would provide you an access token that you then provided to Actual Budget so they could access your accounts on your behalf.

GoCardless have however limited what their free developer accounts can do, which means Actua Budget can no longer get real time access to your acccohnt data.

[–] SlurpingPus@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

Thanks again! This is very comprehensive and much more comprehensible.

[–] mko@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I would avoid YNAB. They had an offline version years back that was really nice until they did a rug pull and disabled it in order to get people to buy their subscription service.

[–] inzen@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I still have the offline version in my Steam library. It still works, just no syncing to cloud.

[–] mko@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 day ago

As do I. I don’t really recall why I just stopped using it - it could just be because I didn’t feel ok feeding my personal finances into software controlled by a shady company.

[–] cdzero@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago

I've got a family member interested in switching to Linux but the finance software is an obstacle. I had a look and landed on gnucash which I thought I would trial myself and then see if if would work for them. I like it!

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 36 points 2 days ago (1 children)

We're going to need another project like SponsorBlock and Dearrow for labeling AI spam...

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[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 75 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Well your first mistake was going to YouTube for information

[–] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 71 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Before all the slop-deluge, you had some chance that some niche channel had an actual human behind it who knew their shit.

Some handyman on youtube helped me learn how to install kitchen counters, cupboards, sink etc. a few years ago.

[–] RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz 24 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The difference is, thers's no stakes in teaching you how to install a counter, nobody has the incentive to generate fake AI videos of that. Product comparison is something where youtube always sucked, whether by paid actors or - now - AI

[–] Prunebutt@slrpnk.net 18 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'd say it really depends on the channel. If it's some hobby project by some 'tistic nerd who really likes to compare dehumidifiers, it can be ok.

[–] Crewman@sopuli.xyz 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Okay, not dehumidifiers, but what abut space heater -

https://youtu.be/ND2mrzPnBic

[–] RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz 7 points 2 days ago

There's also Matthias but try finding any of these videos with just search. Youtube is against authenticity now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_4o5ZlsRMk

[–] BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 30 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Articles are mostly AI slop. For a bit YouTube was actually the best way to have information written by an actual person.

Not anymore unfortunately, now I honestly don't know how to reliably find AI free information online.

[–] AppearanceBoring9229@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 days ago

At least to compare software you can use alternativeto.net

It seems that the best way to avoid AI slop is to find a small community on the the topic.

[–] Ulrich@feddit.org 12 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Nowhere is safe from AI spam. At least these ones are obvious. Written spam is far easier to generate.

[–] strlcpy@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 2 days ago

Web search gives you pages of slop results too, now

[–] iAmTheTot@sh.itjust.works 36 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I don't have a video for you but I've been using Actual for over a year and really like it. I recommend it. Caveat, I very actively interact with my budget (inputting things manually) and cannot speak for it's account linking features.

[–] Coolcoder360@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I use actual as well.

The docker compose works really well, basically set it up once and then it works, even with running updates by pulling new container versions.

I used the account importing to start but now input everything manually and don't do live sync.

Never heard of the other options so didn't know about them to compare before setting up actual. I do like the methodology of actual, where it has you only budget money that actually exists in your account, that feels very sane to me.

[–] chillpanzee@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I just installed Firefly yesterday, and I can say that the docker compose setup was easy. I've got no real opinions yet, just wanted to mention this for OP in case he reads your experience as it being easier. I imagine they're both easy.

I'm curious, when you say you stopped importing, does that mean you were getting info from your banks, and stopped doing that? Why did you stop? My next step was to set up the automated importer for Firefly.

[–] Coolcoder360@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I never set up the actual bank sync, I think what I did was basically a CSV export and then import, rather than the bank sync.

But it's been about a year so not remembering exactly how the import was.

[–] chillpanzee@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago

Got it. Thanks.

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[–] HotChickenFeet@sopuli.xyz 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I think its budgeting features are lackluster, but I have highly enjoyed gnucash for tracking my expenses, incime & where everything goes.

It's all manual more or less, and you do double ledger accounting, so all the money is accounted for somewhere.

[–] moonshadow@slrpnk.net 2 points 2 days ago

Seconding gnucash, there's modern stuff that's slicker but nothing that works better imo

[–] jlow@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 2 days ago

Im reasonable happy with Actual Budget. I like that it has desktop apps that can sync woth a server that was easy to set up, I can import various things via .csv, rules to automatically categorise stuff are nice. I dont care about the envelope budgeting or whatever it's called they're on about but it's easy to ignore / turn off.

[–] ZkhqrD5o@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

Maybe not what you're looking for, but there's a program called "Money Wallet" on Android. It's on F-Droid and free software. Maybe my favourite because every time I spend cash I just open it up and I enter what I just spent.

For professional use, I'd recommend GNU Cash, though.

[–] Sunny@slrpnk.net 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Ive started seeing a lot of these sadly... Luckily they're still somewhat easy to spot.

[–] Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml 15 points 3 days ago

At least on YouTube you can tell at a glance that it's AI.

[–] apprehensively_human@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 days ago

I've been using Actual for a while now, probably close to a year. Before that I was on YNAB, which isn't FOSS but does have a huge library of material for how to make your budget work for you instead of the other way around.

I got off YNAB after they kept raising their subscription fees for seemingly no reason. Actual is not nearly as feature-rich but you can't really argue with the price.

[–] exu@feditown.com 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I tried Actual Budget for a while, but didn't stick with it long term. I also looked at Firefly III, never tried it though.

Eventually I figured out I just want an expense tracker instead of full budgeting and settled for ExpenseOwl

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[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 9 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Why do you think it's AI?

[–] Thorned_Rose@sh.itjust.works 26 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Multiple videos that have the same style of thumbnail (AI generated face excepted). Multiple videos with a very similar thumbnail and exact same wording. They're all within the past year, mostly within the past 6 months (this software has existed for many years, why all of a sudden do multiple channels want to do vs or review videos of them). They're all short videos and its just not possible to give a proper breakdown of feature or a review of budgeting software in that amount of time. The few videos I tested used AI voices and all had a similar start (I didn't waste my time watching the whole video). The faces on the videos look AI generated or modified....

[–] PartyPatella@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 days ago

Thanks for elaborating! I am in no way great at spotting such slop videos, but I did notice some of the stuff you mentioned.

In some of the videos, they have a little "self-cam" in the corner - is that artificial too?

Regarding artificial voicing, I did test a few videos - the phrasing, punctuation and sound effects were similar. Is that how you figure it is artificial?

And what gives away the faces are generated? Most videos even have comments - everything is fake?!

Thanks in advance. If I came across only one of the videos - and did not see all thumbnails in a search for instance - I must shamefully admit that I probably would not have spotted it.

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[–] Madrigal@lemmy.world 8 points 3 days ago

This shit pre-dates “AI”. AI just lets them do it faster and cheaper.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Another recmendation for Actual. I spend very little time having to interact with it, because after the initial setup, all transactions are now synched from my bank accounts, and 90% are automatically classified into my categories (not by "AI" or something, you just set rules like "payments to Rewe are always groceries").

[–] pix_wbmr@feddit.org 7 points 3 days ago

I got so many AI slop videos regarding tech lately... it's turning everything into shit :(

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