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 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.

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.