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Comment on What are some FOSS programs that are objectively better than their proprietary counterparts?

Home Assistant is - by far - a better home automation platform than anything else I’ve tried. Most of them cannot integrate with as many platforms and your ability to create automations is not as powerful.

Folks will argue that it’s harder. I argue back that if you buy a hub with it pre-installed, your setup experience is as easy or easier than HomeKit or Google Home or maybe Alexa.

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iarigby@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I have home assistant green, I just plugged it in and it set itself up fully, zero intervention needed. In a few minutes, everything was ready and it automatically found and (after confirming) imported all my existing stuff. Flawless.

UX is very unintuitive though, I’ve had it for a while and can not get used to how things are organized

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jj4211@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
It’s also a good example of how an open source project manages to outmaneuver big company offerings.

Home assistant just wants to make the stuff work. Whatever the stuff is, whoever makes it, do whatever it takes to make it work so long as there are users. Also to warn users when someone is difficult to support due to cloud lock in.

All the proprietary stuff wants to force people to pay subscription and pay for their product or products that licensed the right to play with the ecosystem. So they needlessly make stuff cloud based, because that’s the way to take away user control. They won’t work with the device you want because that vendor didn’t pay up to work with that.

Commercial solutions may have more resources to work with and that may be critical for some software, but they divert more of those resources toward self enrichment at the expense of the user.

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jaxxed@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Has anybody tried the HA voice hardware. Not sure how it works (does it use a cloud AI?)

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CocaineShrimp@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I fully agree - home assistant is the way to go, even if it’s a little more complicated.

It’s much easier to add / remove / replace hubs as needed. A few years ago I switched my main hub from Alexa to HA. Then, a month or two ago, I decided to move away from Alexa due to the speech to text recognition noticeably degrading, they removed features (I forget what the feature was, it was a while ago), and recent policy changes. Super easy to disconnect and switch to a different assistant like Siri / HomeKit.

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