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The midwit home

(dynomight.substack.com)
416 points stacktrust | 1 comments | 12 Oct 23 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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marcinzm ◴[12 Oct 23 17:28 UTC] No.37860179[source]▶
>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.

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barbazoo ◴[12 Oct 23 17:31 UTC] No.37860217[source]▶
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).
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1. Negitivefrags ◴[12 Oct 23 18:04 UTC] No.37860681[source]▶
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.