The midwit home

>The hell? But people seem to think that Home Assistant is good. (Something about subscription fees and invasive apps and forced obsolescence?) So you search for “how to get a Home Assistant”. This reveals a recursive landscape of terror:

Google "how to install home assistant" which leads to:

>https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/

>If you are unsure of what to choose, follow the Raspberry Pi guide to install Home Assistant Operating System.

This leads to:

>https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/raspberrypi

This has a nice visual guide that requires you to know how to buy a raspberry pi, how to plug in a raspberry p, how to plug in an sd card (twice), and how to navigate to a url.

I felt like that was a big strawman. HA in particular makes it very easy to chose how to install, they even a product you can buy that's ready to use (HA Yellow).

>This has a nice visual guide that requires you to know how to buy a raspberry pi, how to plug in a raspberry p, how to plug in an sd card (twice), and how to navigate to a url.

What about upkeep? Sure, installing PopOS is pretty easy if you follow the tutorial, but what happens if you try to install Steam one day and it breaks your desktop environment? Or maybe your sd card accumulates too much writes and corrupts your OS, and you have to diagnose the root cause?

>What about upkeep? Sure, installing PopOS is pretty easy if you follow the tutorial, but what happens if you try to install Steam one day and it breaks your desktop environment?

Huh? I have no idea what you're talking about here.

>Or maybe your sd card accumulates too much writes and corrupts your OS, and you have to diagnose the root cause?

Get a new sd card and reload from the last backup.

This is probably for an audience less enamoured with the Pi than the HN crowd. Someone that's more interested in getting to a working result than having to yak shave for a couple days or more to do the same.

For someone who doesn't have a Linux background, "just put it on a Raspberry Pi" is kind of like saying "You write a distributed map reduce function in Erlang". Ie: it's easy if they know it, but if they don't then that "just" is doing a lot of work there.

Pre-installed is almost certainly the way to go for such a person.

HA is similar to self-managed Kubernetes: easy to install, a bitch to maintain. Updates seem to constantly break services and configurations.

What are you doing with your Pi where you’re running both HAOS and Steam? Definitely seems like an edge case. Put Debian on the thing stick it on a bookshelf and forget it exists

edit: Actually put HAOS on, no reason to run Debian

I googled "how to install home assistant", and the links you point to above don't appear to be anywhere on the first page of results.

The second link is this one: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/guide-how-to-install-h...

But the linked page is pretty complex.

As reasonable as that is, the starting point for this is a person that wants to install smart switches and other home automations.

This is already a job that requires fairly decent electrical knowledge, especially if there are 3-way switches involved.

Turn-key solutions exist for people that don't want to deal with the complexity.

I purchased a home assistant yellow and my experience was anything but “ready to use”.

You have to build the damn thing, which isn’t hard per se since it’s ultimately only 3 actual components, but it still took me some time and felt complicated since it involves attaching a heat sink with thermal compound on a CPU.

And then the software install process isn’t totally amazing either since it involves flashing a USB stick, but also needing to choose a few very non-obvious options.

Should I install HA on the EMMC and later move my data-disk to the nVME drive or install the OS on the nVME drive directly? Google random forums to find out what people think of this decision first I guess.

I mean I think it’s still a good product, don’t get me wrong, but it is still very much a power user thing.

Which is probably fine because setting up HA itself when you have an install isn’t exactly a picnic either.

I mean, HomeAssistantOS has a GUI in the browser with an upgrade button that appears when there's a new release (which is frequent -- actually my biggest complaint about HA is how fast they move and that I can't configure HA to just install the updates as they arrive, and I have to actually click the button. Horror.)

It performs a backup whenever you perform a release, so if the SD card gets corrupted.. just follow the install instructions a second time and upload the last backup?

That's it for the upkeep, other than dealing with 3rd party APIs that change and make things break, but that's not HomeAssistant's fault.

That result does not show up for me when I google it and the other one is the top result for me.

If someone can come up with a reason why top results aren't even present on others' page 1, I would be very interested.

> HA in particular makes it very easy to chose how to install

This is the problem with lots of stuff similar to HA when it tries to break into a non-enthusiast audience: people don't WANT to choose how to install it. Most of the time they have no clue why they would choose one thing over another and giving them those choices is confusing and overwhelming.

It's like starting a an intro to Nix tutorial with by asking if the user wants to enable flakes.

I say this as a very active user of HA & Nix for 5+ years.

I don’t touch my Home Assistant. It just works.

With HA it doesn't help that their installation docs are a mess with solutions that don't provide the same features.

I've had HA for +4-5 years too.

Google "personalizes" search results.

When it comes to Home Assistant, the Pi is actually a much more pragmatic option.

It works out of the box, is very easy to source (hell some brick & mortar stores sell them), has very good Linux support due to its popularity, and makes up a large part of the install base meaning HA support for it is unlikely to get deprecated.

I don't know if it's changed but I felt like a super genius a few years ago when I finally got my HA up and running on a pi, and I'm a linux person and former system admin. There's Home Assistant and Home Assistant Core, Docker or not Docker, install HACS or don't. Some things don't seem to work unless you're on a Docker container but then it's a pain to ssh in and find folders to install stuff. I really hope it's better now as my HA install has mysteriously died and I haven't had the heart to dig in and see what the issue is so I'm guessing I'm going to have to start from scratch.

> Sure, installing PopOS is pretty easy if you follow the tutorial, but what happens if you try to install Steam one day and it breaks your desktop environment?

I think you're replying to the wrong comment. This was a comment about installing Home Assistant OS, which shouldn't ever be a base for running Steam!

The scare quotes are disingenuous. However we may dislike or disapprove of Google's algorithms, it is absolutely accurate to describe the results as personalized.

What a time to be alive

>Huh? I have no idea what you're talking about here.

https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M?t=632

>Get a new sd card and reload from the last backup.

1. How do you do backups? Is it built into home assistant? Do you think the average person knows or will remember to make backups?

2. "restore from backups" works if the sdcard just dies. If it's silently corrupting your install and causing weird behavior you won't even know it's sd card's fault unless you go through troubleshooting.

> What are you doing with your Pi where you’re running both HAOS and Steam? Definitely seems like an edge case. Put Debian on the thing stick it on a bookshelf and forget it exists

I'm not saying that's a specific issue you'll run into with home assistant. I'm just pointing out that's an example of something that's simple in theory to set up, but causes headaches if you venture off the happy path.

This is not an explanation. I am aware the search results can be different to different people and based on demographic information.

My specific question is why would a top result not even end up on the first page. This requires a more significant explanation than "its possible".

I'm not sure if you realize it, but you're demonstrating exactly the thing described in the blog post.

Why the hell do I need a backup for my light switch?

The first time I installed HomeAssistant (on a Raspberry Pi), it worked great for a couple of months, then it bricked itself because it ran out of log space. I re-installed it. A couple of months later, it auto-updated itself and decided to lock me out because apparently it now required that you log in where it previously didn't. At around the same time, Apple locked out their HomeKit HA integration so I could no longer tell Siri to flip the lights. At that point I just gave up.

Recently I tried reinstalling it again, and let's just say I don't recommend it if you value your sanity.

Every time I look into HA, I face this kind of cognitive dissonance between my experience and people condescendingly telling me that I'm obviously doing something wrong.

I just want a zwave hub for my light switches. I don't want any of this crap.

Got it, makes sense and I definitely agree: with Linux systems the more you deviate from the popular applications and use cases the more elbow grease is required. FWIW I’ve never had difficulty with my DE resulting from running Steam but presumably other people have experienced it. Certainly keeping Proton updated is a massive hassle

Right, but the fact that running it on a Pi with Linux is the "much more pragmatic solution" is already ruling out about 90% of the US.

> is very easy to source

I was with you until this point. A Pi hasn't been easy to source for almost 4 years now.

> I am aware the search results can be different to different people and based on demographic information.

You answered yourself. If you are are searching zoos and cute animals more often than programming stuff, "python egg" will return dramatically different results. This is not a theoretic possibility, it is the way google works (which I think is unfortunate).

Keep in mind that Home Assistant provides ready-made images that behave like an appliance and can auto-update. In fact, it doesn't even give you a shell/SSH by default and such access is discouraged.

Thus the Linux/RaspberryPi underlying complexity is irrelevant to the user - the "complexity" is to dd/BalenaEtcher/etc a downloaded file to an SD card, put the card in the Pi and connect it to power. From there it's available over the network and can be configured through a web browser.

> you're demonstrating exactly the thing described in the blog post.

exactly. Who wants to backup anything in their house just to be able to do things that work perfectly well with 50's technology?

They individualize search results: they give different results to different people.

They don't personalize search results: they don't give people results which are optimal for the searcher, but rather those which attempt to be optimal for the advertisers without discouraging the searcher enough to swap search engines.