- 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.
Is HA not already the mainstream option for privacy and user control? Maybe I just live in a bubble, but it seems like it’s already the go-to if you care about those things.
To become mainstream the install process for a fully featured setup needs massive work.
I run it in a docker container and it works great.
For others, beware that in a docker, each plugin needs its own docker container.
I run everything in docker except for HA which I run in a VM (HaOS) which makes it super easy to use.
Edit: by plugins I meant add-ons
each plugin needs its own docker container.
What are you talking about? This is simply not true.
No it’s true. I run ha in a docker container too, and it doesn’t support the plugin supervisor at all. You have to spin up your own plugin containers manually and configure the connection to them in the core ha instance, that’s what I did with piper/wyoming. I’d be happy to share a compose file if someone wants it.
You don’t need a supervisor with docker. And you don’t need separate containers for plugins.
If you’re running HA in a docker, you need to run additional containers for add-ons. This is called out in the docs. Add-ons are only for HA OS or if you install it natively, with the supervisor (HA Supervised).
If you are willing to dedicate a device to just HA you don’t need separate containers for the add-ons. For ease of use that makes a lot of sense, it’s, pretty plug and play.
Personally the Pi I’m running it on can handle a lot more than just HA so a docker makes more sense, and just have the add-ons I’m using also defined in the docker compose file.
So, add-ons, not plugins. You don’t need add-ons if you are not using HA OS, they’re irrelevant.
That’s not true at all.
I think the wording is off.
Many or most add-ons need their own docker containers, that is what the add-ons are.
Every integration does not need its own docker container.
Well, the thing is, you don’t need add ons when running in Docker.
I had it briefly up and running and can only say… it’s a bear, at least if you are trying to use it as a drop-in replacement with existing hardware. I’m sure I’ll go back and sort it out at some point, but it left me just feeling tired and frustrated even when I had it doing most of what I wanted.
If you were thoughtful about hardware from the ground up, maybe it would be more straightforward, but I tried getting it running on just an old workstation with ubuntu installed on it that I use for very basic stuff like syncthing and it was just painful. Mix of Kasa/Wyze/Philips devices that are just what I’ve somehow collected over time.
It would be nice to see better first-class add-on support. I found myself needing to SSH into a VM to get stuff into it, and even then it was twitchy in all the wrong ways. Would also be nice to see better support for the containerized version, because that’s so much easier to distribute and execute compared to a VM. Next time I’ll probably just try to do it all with docker and see if it hurts less, since I don’t think any addons I was using were critical to begin with.
That said, if you’re doing HA, get a dedicated piece of hardware for it. I suspect it vastly simplifies things.
It’s not really a “bear”, but it IS highly configurable down to the tiniest detail, so requires a certain level of technical expertise. Definitely not for a novice, but that’s what Amazon, Apple, and Google try to cover. I will say there are other options out there that are great for offline home automation, but HA is the most competent and complete.
I’d argue it’s a bear and I still use it. YAML is just fucking awful and I’m glad they’ve been hiding it more and more over the years but it’s still there. Zwave is still wildly confusing compared to something like a Hubitat which is just plug and play (guess who has to just rebuild his Zwave stuff from scratch). It’s also insanely organized where add ons are different than integrations, and are hidden in different menus, as are system functions and just… It’s a mess from UX POV. It’s also a nightmare to try to interact with the codebase or documentation or even ask questions, much less make a suggestion. As an aside to address the point of the article, I have absolutely zero worry that they will ever forget about power users, because I, and many other power users who have interacted with Paulus on boards before agree he is kind of an asshole who absolutely does not understand why anyone would want to do anything different than how he imagines it - including documentation or UX or whatever. Home Assistant is totally safe for power users.
Now of course I’m not trying to say it’s bad, just that it is kind of a bear even for the tech savvy. You can’t beat HA for being able to interface with absolutely anything. There’s almost always already an integration written. It can do anything, and if you’re persistent enough you can kludge together a solution that works in exactly the way you need. You might even be able to hide all the kludge from your spouse. It’s also all free, because Paulus and a hundred other devs contribute their time for free and they’re amazing for it. Absolutely awesome for power users. But being simple or easy just isn’t one of its many, many pros.
First off:
If you can’t grasp YAML, you’re in trouble in the future. It’s been around for decades at this point, and it’s a helluva lot more readable than JSON, which is the currently most transmitted format over the wire on the planet.
YAML is also used by all the big configuration languages out there, Infrastructure as code frameworks, and even novice stuff like Square space.
Second: ZWave is a protocol. HA supports that as well. Had nothing to do with HA as a platform, they just support it. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Example: I run Zigbee for everything on my HA. I could switch everything to ZWave tomorrow if I wanted.
This is a “you” problem, not the rest of the world.
Can’t wait to ditch Google Home. Nothing to do with their warmongering. Just hate that the assistant is such a dumb removed.
Thankfully someone is going to make a localish smart speaker.
The hardware still looks so great, but responsiveness has gone to the shitter in recent years.
