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.
What about upkeep? Sure, installing PopOS is pretty easy if you follow the tutorial, but what happens if you try to install Steam one day and it breaks your desktop environment? Or maybe your sd card accumulates too much writes and corrupts your OS, and you have to diagnose the root cause?
Huh? I have no idea what you're talking about here.
>Or maybe your sd card accumulates too much writes and corrupts your OS, and you have to diagnose the root cause?
Get a new sd card and reload from the last backup.
Why the hell do I need a backup for my light switch?
The first time I installed HomeAssistant (on a Raspberry Pi), it worked great for a couple of months, then it bricked itself because it ran out of log space. I re-installed it. A couple of months later, it auto-updated itself and decided to lock me out because apparently it now required that you log in where it previously didn't. At around the same time, Apple locked out their HomeKit HA integration so I could no longer tell Siri to flip the lights. At that point I just gave up.
Recently I tried reinstalling it again, and let's just say I don't recommend it if you value your sanity.
Every time I look into HA, I face this kind of cognitive dissonance between my experience and people condescendingly telling me that I'm obviously doing something wrong.
I just want a zwave hub for my light switches. I don't want any of this crap.