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.
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.
edit: Actually put HAOS on, no reason to run Debian
The second link is this one: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/guide-how-to-install-h...
But the linked page is pretty complex.
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.
You have to build the damn thing, which isn’t hard per se since it’s ultimately only 3 actual components, but it still took me some time and felt complicated since it involves attaching a heat sink with thermal compound on a CPU.
And then the software install process isn’t totally amazing either since it involves flashing a USB stick, but also needing to choose a few very non-obvious options.
Should I install HA on the EMMC and later move my data-disk to the nVME drive or install the OS on the nVME drive directly? Google random forums to find out what people think of this decision first I guess.
I mean I think it’s still a good product, don’t get me wrong, but it is still very much a power user thing.
Which is probably fine because setting up HA itself when you have an install isn’t exactly a picnic either.
It performs a backup whenever you perform a release, so if the SD card gets corrupted.. just follow the install instructions a second time and upload the last backup?
That's it for the upkeep, other than dealing with 3rd party APIs that change and make things break, but that's not HomeAssistant's fault.
If someone can come up with a reason why top results aren't even present on others' page 1, I would be very interested.
This is the problem with lots of stuff similar to HA when it tries to break into a non-enthusiast audience: people don't WANT to choose how to install it. Most of the time they have no clue why they would choose one thing over another and giving them those choices is confusing and overwhelming.
It's like starting a an intro to Nix tutorial with by asking if the user wants to enable flakes.
I say this as a very active user of HA & Nix for 5+ years.
I've had HA for +4-5 years too.
It works out of the box, is very easy to source (hell some brick & mortar stores sell them), has very good Linux support due to its popularity, and makes up a large part of the install base meaning HA support for it is unlikely to get deprecated.
I think you're replying to the wrong comment. This was a comment about installing Home Assistant OS, which shouldn't ever be a base for running Steam!
https://youtu.be/0506yDSgU7M?t=632
>Get a new sd card and reload from the last backup.
1. How do you do backups? Is it built into home assistant? Do you think the average person knows or will remember to make backups?
2. "restore from backups" works if the sdcard just dies. If it's silently corrupting your install and causing weird behavior you won't even know it's sd card's fault unless you go through troubleshooting.
I'm not saying that's a specific issue you'll run into with home assistant. I'm just pointing out that's an example of something that's simple in theory to set up, but causes headaches if you venture off the happy path.
My specific question is why would a top result not even end up on the first page. This requires a more significant explanation than "its possible".
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.
I was with you until this point. A Pi hasn't been easy to source for almost 4 years now.
You answered yourself. If you are are searching zoos and cute animals more often than programming stuff, "python egg" will return dramatically different results. This is not a theoretic possibility, it is the way google works (which I think is unfortunate).
Thus the Linux/RaspberryPi underlying complexity is irrelevant to the user - the "complexity" is to dd/BalenaEtcher/etc a downloaded file to an SD card, put the card in the Pi and connect it to power. From there it's available over the network and can be configured through a web browser.
exactly. Who wants to backup anything in their house just to be able to do things that work perfectly well with 50's technology?
They don't personalize search results: they don't give people results which are optimal for the searcher, but rather those which attempt to be optimal for the advertisers without discouraging the searcher enough to swap search engines.