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Comment by beezlewax | Hacker News Reader

These are not viable options for the vast majority of users. Most peppe don't have a clue how to set up open source options, let alone set them up with usable hardware.

The average consumer wants out of the box solutions that don't require a degree in Computer Science to use.

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Home Assistant is getting far easier to set up than you might expect, especially because they now do in fact have out of the box devices. It's not quite as ridiculously simple, not quite yet, but they're rapidly improving and it won't be long until they're better than Amazon Alexa/Google Home/other commercial solutions.

What are these "out of the box devices"? I looked into things a couple of years ago, and back then it was all too much effort to set things up and keep things running and integrated, so I just went with Smart Life stuff from AliExpress. But would love to have Home Assistant if it means I don't need to spend weekends just reading docs, pairing, setting things up, connecting stuff...

I've got HA set up (nearly 2 years now with a whole host of things connected: Bluetooth, WIFI, iOS devices, Zigbee, etc.) and I think I'm only just getting to the point now of two weekends worth of reading docs (primarily because their documentation seems to be written by developers rather than technical writers). Most time I've spent tinkering with HA was modifying their embedded `mastodon.py` to make it work with GotoSocial (but I think someone upstreamed a fix for that and it's no longer required.)

Look at Home Assistant Green [0]. They've also got a smart speakers as of just recently [1], although they're still a "preview edition". The prices seem comparable to other similar smart home devices, IMO.

[0] https://www.home-assistant.io/green [1] https://www.home-assistant.io/voice-pe/

For the wifi smartlife stuff, you can use the official cloud based integration or if you want local control, the unofficial tuyalocal. The official integration is really easy to use but if your internet connection drops, you can't control your devices so I prefer to use tuyalocal it still requires to add the devices to the smartlife app once and then you add a device from the addon by scanning a qr code with the app. Once this is done you have local control over the device.

Zigbee devices require more initial setup, you have to buy a dongle, install the Zigbee2mqtt addon and the mqtt integration, but once this is done adding a devices is a really simple process : you put the devices into pair mode and allow pairing for 90s in the Zigbee2mqtt page and rename your device to something useful.

Home assistant is a nightmare to set up. Even with their hardware, you need to learn a whole new vocabulary and God help you if you stay off the happy path.

If HA (which is a wonderful project) is your example of usable OSS software, then your bar is set lightyears away from what actual consumers need.

At no point did I say it's usable by the average, non-tech-inclined user. I said it's getting much better, quickly. It absolutely still needs work to replace something like Amazon or Google have.

Just to chip in with a plug for HomeAssistant. I am really not very techy at all, but so far I have used the out-of-box HA Green version and:

-installed waterproof exterior socket, remotely controllable -installed various interior sockets -installed smart thermometer to control our little plant propagator

So far it seems to be a case of checking that the thing you are going to buy has a working HA integration program (which seem to be added on a fairly frequent basis) and then just adding it to the network. The only vaguely difficult thing I had to do was log in to my router homepage and change the wifi mode to allow the exterior socket to connect.

I'd much rather just not use Amazon/Google/etc where possible, as I don't like the feeling of being used.

I am relatively tech savvy, installed HA recently in a VM on my media server and the thing was just a massive pain in the arse, particularly trying to migrate Thread devices from Apple Home to HA.

Sure things might be getting easier but they’re certainly not easy.

They're already better compared to commercial solutions regarding device/service support and complex automations.

But missing opinionated defaults, really, you still have to roll your own home/away/vacation solution. Creating a dashboard requires you to understand the meta of Home assistant which takes a lot of time.

People asking should I get PI or NUC every single day in the reddit. I am happy with my 2000lines long configuration file except scripts and automations. But it won't be easy for someone is not tech savvy.

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