- 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.
I’m totally cool with that. Even as a more technically-minded user, I see a lot of things that could be way more streamlined.
I totally agree! They’ve come a long way, but making it easier to use can only help grow support for the project.
Yeah I’m not using it yet, partly because I’m not at the home server level of Linux competency, but I do want to move towards it at some point
If you want to skip ahead, there are also a few ways to get Home Assistant running that don’t need any level of Linux competency:
If you don’t want to run Home Assistant OS, and instead want to run Home Assistant as one of several applications running on a Server, that’s when you need to start getting comfortable administrating a Linux server.
I didn’t realize their devices are plug and play. I’ve considered one before and probably will go that route if it’s that easy when the wife and I have more than a pair of light bulbs to control
Just do it. Quick and easy, and not that complex. Even if you only have a couple of light bulbs, now you can schedule them, automate them, integrate them with any voice assistant you may use
You may find you already have a lot more than just a pair of lightbulbs. Mine sees my router and stats, printer status, TV, speakers, thermostats, my phone, among things I got before HA
For me, I crossed the threshold when I decided to treat it as an appliance (Raspberry Pi 4) rather than one more thing that depended on me setting up a lab. I still haven’t made progress in the lab, but HA just works
Well you have successfully doomed me to a day of attempting to deal with the same dang server error.
And here I thought that this might be a nice way to set up a few things my wife would like
If you want the awesomeness of self-hosting with somewhat less drama, give unraid a look-see! Although if you are looking to just host HA and not have a full media center and other stuff, it could be overkill.
My attempts at self hosting have been mostly an attempt to set up jellyfin, *arr, and foundryvtt on an old computer at which point I realized I don’t really understand terminal or networks. I’m getting a bit more comfortable with my terminal in my desktop, but I’m going at a reasonable pace nowadays. I don’t have a ton of time or money to sink into it