this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2024
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  • Home Assistant is now part of the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit aiming to fight against surveillance capitalism and offer privacy, choice, and sustainability.
  • The foundation will own and govern all Home Assistant entities, including the cloud, and has plans for new hardware and AI integration.
  • Home Assistant aims to become a mainstream smart home option with a focus on privacy and user control, while also expanding partnerships and certifications.
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[–] [email protected] 44 points 4 months ago (2 children)

To become mainstream the install process for a fully featured setup needs massive work.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

You can buy preinstalled hardware like the Home Assistant Green if you aren't up for it. I don't think you can really make it much simpler without just selling the hub itself.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I’m still confused by the different versions of HA. Does that version include all of the features? Or is it the basic install that’s easiest to install?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Yes home assistant green comes preinstalled with everything you need, you can use addons, etc. Just buy it, plug it in and start going. There aren't really "basic" and "advanced" versions of HA. There's just some that have addons and others where you do the addons yourself as docker containers. But all of them have the same HA features.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

In what way? It's dirt simple to get started.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago (4 children)

For you maybe. You think your grandma could set up home assistant?

[–] [email protected] 36 points 4 months ago

It'd be tough, but I guess we could dig her up and try?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, that's all Alexa and Google have on home assistant. Not to mention that sometimes you have to write yaml to create automations.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

That doesn't feel like a fair comparison. For the same level of setup you can get with Alexa and Google, I feel like it's the same level of difficulty. If you want complex automations, sure you can yaml, but you'll be doing things you couldn't with Alexa or Google.

This is assuming you're starting with a yellow kit or something already set up and yeah, it's basically just as easy.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, that's all Alexa and Google have on home assistant.

That seems like a massive thing though. If the average Joe can’t even install the product, then it doesn’t matter if it has way more features than its competitors.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago

If average joe can't be assed to to some research, the product isn't for average joe and that's a good thing. Because designing a product for average joe has a lot of drawbacks.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

You think my grandma fucks with Google Home or Apple Homekit?

Not everyone is up to the task anyway.

I've recently switched to the VM instead of the docker, the setup is so easy if you fail at that you shouldn't be doing anything with it to begin with.

You can buy pre-installed devices which are essentially plug-and-play

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's a rhetorical question, you're missing the entire rhetoric of it...

Which is that not everyone is technically inclined, actually most aren't, so the majority of everyone is not going to be capable of operating a technically demanding system.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I do understand what you're saying, but not everyone will or should self host.

I don't know when you've tried the setup, but it's gotten to a point where i do find it very easy.

If you go the way with a pre built device too, all you have to do is creating an account and plenty device pop up immediately without any further steps.

The new step by step automation creation was all which was left to improve.

If you fail at that, you probably fail at other solutions too

[–] [email protected] -5 points 4 months ago

How are skills issue the fault of an open source project that follows open source paradigms and works like every other piece of open source software?

Why do we care? I sure as fuck don't and I contribute to a lot of FOSS projects.