zlacker

>>stackt+(OP)
>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.

>>marcin+Yb
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).

>>barbaz+Ac
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.

>>switch+9g
As reasonable as that is, the starting point for this is a person that wants to install smart switches and other home automations.

This is already a job that requires fairly decent electrical knowledge, especially if there are 3-way switches involved.

Turn-key solutions exist for people that don't want to deal with the complexity.