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The midwit home

(dynomight.substack.com)
416 points stacktrust | 2 comments | 12 Oct 23 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.482s | 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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gruez ◴[12 Oct 23 17:37 UTC] No.37860314[source]▶
>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?

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tech_ken ◴[12 Oct 23 17:54 UTC] No.37860516[source]▶
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

replies(1): >>37861814 #
1. gruez ◴[12 Oct 23 19:20 UTC] No.37861814[source]▶
> 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.

replies(1): >>37862332 #
2. tech_ken ◴[12 Oct 23 19:55 UTC] No.37862332[source]▶
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