The little smart home platform that could

https://programming.dev/post/13034760

The little smart home platform that could - programming.dev

- 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.

I had it briefly up and running and can only say... it's a bear, at least if you are trying to use it as a drop-in replacement with existing hardware. I'm sure I'll go back and sort it out at some point, but it left me just feeling tired and frustrated even when I had it doing most of what I wanted.

If you were thoughtful about hardware from the ground up, maybe it would be more straightforward, but I tried getting it running on just an old workstation with ubuntu installed on it that I use for very basic stuff like syncthing and it was just painful.

It would be nice to see better first-class add-on support. I found myself needing to SSH into a VM to get stuff into it, and even then it was twitchy in all the wrong ways. Would also be nice to see better support for the containerized version, because that's so much easier to distribute and execute compared to a VM. Next time I'll probably just try to do it all with docker and see if it hurts less, since I don't think any addons I was using were critical to begin with.

That said, if you're doing HA, get a dedicated piece of hardware for it. I suspect it vastly simplifies things.

Addons are just docker containers at the end of the day so as long as you know how to spin up a docker container, you’re not adding much. And as long as you know how to spin up a docker container I don’t think you’d have much issue getting the dockerized version working.