The midwit home

>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.

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 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.

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

> 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!

>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.

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

> 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?