The little smart home platform that could
theverge.com
- 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.
You are viewing a single comment
To become mainstream the install process for a fully featured setup needs massive work.
You can buy preinstalled hardware like the Home Assistant Green if you aren't up for it. I don't think you can really make it much simpler without just selling the hub itself.
I’m still confused by the different versions of HA. Does that version include all of the features? Or is it the basic install that’s easiest to install?
Yes home assistant green comes preinstalled with everything you need, you can use addons, etc. Just buy it, plug it in and start going. There aren't really "basic" and "advanced" versions of HA. There's just some that have addons and others where you do the addons yourself as docker containers. But all of them have the same HA features.
In what way? It's dirt simple to get started.
For you maybe. You think your grandma could set up home assistant?
It'd be tough, but I guess we could dig her up and try?
Yeah, that's all Alexa and Google have on home assistant. Not to mention that sometimes you have to write yaml to create automations.
That doesn't feel like a fair comparison. For the same level of setup you can get with Alexa and Google, I feel like it's the same level of difficulty. If you want complex automations, sure you can yaml, but you'll be doing things you couldn't with Alexa or Google.
This is assuming you're starting with a yellow kit or something already set up and yeah, it's basically just as easy.
That seems like a massive thing though. If the average Joe can’t even install the product, then it doesn’t matter if it has way more features than its competitors.
If average joe can't be assed to to some research, the product isn't for average joe and that's a good thing. Because designing a product for average joe has a lot of drawbacks.
You think my grandma fucks with Google Home or Apple Homekit?
Not everyone is up to the task anyway.
I've recently switched to the VM instead of the docker, the setup is so easy if you fail at that you shouldn't be doing anything with it to begin with.
You can buy pre-installed devices which are essentially plug-and-play
It's a rhetorical question, you're missing the entire rhetoric of it...
Which is that not everyone is technically inclined, actually most aren't, so the majority of everyone is not going to be capable of operating a technically demanding system.
I do understand what you're saying, but not everyone will or should self host.
I don't know when you've tried the setup, but it's gotten to a point where i do find it very easy.
If you go the way with a pre built device too, all you have to do is creating an account and plenty device pop up immediately without any further steps.
The new step by step automation creation was all which was left to improve.
If you fail at that, you probably fail at other solutions too
How are skills issue the fault of an open source project that follows open source paradigms and works like every other piece of open source software?
Why do we care? I sure as fuck don't and I contribute to a lot of FOSS projects.