Mastodawn

@cstross I find parts of the manual being only being on YouTube exceptionally annoying but it's not quite a deal breaker for me for some product categories (mostly 3D printers because if you exclude all of the ones which have parts there instructions exclusively on YouTube you end up eliminating 2/3 of your options)

Charlie Stross Jun 9

@addressforbots I'll grant a limited exception for complex physical machines (some assembly required) as long as there's paper documentation as well and the videos are primarily tutorials/how-tos. But for software, unless it's video-editing/3D editing software, it's a deal-breaker.

@cstross the only documentation for bleeping software being a YouTube video is annoying you know what's doubly annoying when there is written documentation and a YouTube video and a key piece of information is only in the YouTube video (or even worse there is no complete documentation in a single format and it's all scattered between the actual docs, YouTube videos and discord) and you only find out about this in the in the depths of a reddit thread after multiple hours of googling and debugging

@addressforbots @cstross Or indeed when the quick start guide lists four different install methods but neglects to mention that one of these is what all the rest of the documentation assumes and the others don’t have all functionality that’s listed in the docs. *hairy eyeball @ home assistant*

Complexity of systems

@Tubemeister @cstross yeah I just run the home assistant with their dedicated os thing on a raspberry pi these days used to run it on my main NAS box using Docker but gave up some time around when they basically phased out yaml configs for a loss of stuff

@addressforbots I’m still running docker, indeed. Might move the lot to a VM at some point but I’m sure that will have its own foibles. I’d like to keep the number of boxes running at home to a minimum so the general “just give it its own hardware” model has proved annoying.

@Tubemeister the funny thing is I'm in NZ you can basically get a raspberry pi for MSRP around here (not much from business/industrial customers here) so the whole give it a dedicated hardware thing isn't as much of a burden as it might be elsewhere (still annoying though even at close to MSRP modern raspberry pis' aren't cheap)

@addressforbots Oh I have a few spare pi4bs knocking around, that’s not the problem. It’s just that I have a few more little things to run and having two boxes sitting there mostly idle seems silly and wasteful. There’s no reason HA couldn’t be just another daemon on a little home server, as it is with the dockers.

Ah well. For now I just do without whatever extras the other thing offers and we’ll see when it breaks or gets annoying enough to bother doing something about it. ;)

@Tubemeister there are things like that that do occasionally need dedicated hardware if you want them to perform well basically anything to do with PBX stuff if you want it to work consistently at anything other than a couple of calls at once you're going to need dedicated hardware even if you only use a tenth of the processing power because of timing and latency (no I'm not bitter)

@addressforbots oh yeah I’d give that its own hw too. But I don’t run that at home, and I try to keep the HA from becoming truly mission critical too. It’s not that reliable really…

@addressforbots plus the raspberry pi kinda sucks. :) microsd cards are quite slow…

@Tubemeister the raspberry pi that runs my Homer assistant uses a USB 3 to SATA adapter to connect to a SSD that was originally intended as an upgrade to my mother's aging laptop but ended up being used for its current purpose when she decided to just get rid of her laptop because it was too much trouble