Ha, I roasted you for having the good sense to let somebody else handle some of this stuff for you.

Nobody in crazy rabbit hole club is allowed to do anything the easy way!!

I definitely did not claim it was braking privacy. As far as I can tell it was just querying an update server but for some reason it was doing it with such frequency (hundreds a minute for hours out of the day) that I deemed it was broken and that the OS was not managed well.

Other people took a more suspicious view but mostly they just lost my trust that they had any business running a system on my network. If you google around you can get more nuanced takes I don’t actually know if they ever fixed it.

HAOS is a managed operating system, which is perfect for people who want to automate their home but don’t want to manage a Linux machine. It’s a little wild to me to see a person in this community advocating a managed OS. Like, what are we even doing here??

I killed HAOS and set it up in docker because it was phoning home a lot. Sometimes there were hundreds of dns queries a minute to HA servers. No thanks.

Studying evolutionary biology in my undergrad had a big impact on how I look at systems. Judge them by their effect, and not their parsimony. If the mess inside starts to negatively impact efficacy, it will almost always get replaced and almost never get fixed.

Getting obsessed with “how the sausage is made” is a pointless endeavor. If it’s good, eat it, if not make something that tastes better.

Another vote for home assistant. It is not just the best FOSS option, it might just be the best option altogether.

Some advice, think carefully about what you want to achieve with automation before you start. Take some time to draw up what you are going to do before you buy anything. Think about extensibility and don’t force yourself to lay out big money and time all at once. Will Smith (tested.com, tech pod, not Independence Day) recommends doing one room at a time and focusing on spaces that are primarily yours first.

Things to consider: If you live with other people, it might be wise to make everything transparent. Meaning the light switches still turn the lights on and off on demand etc.

Wi-Fi is sort of a poor solution to communicating with devices, especially ones that don’t have access to mains power all the time. Consider if you are going to deploy zigbee, z-wave, or a matter mesh. Matter, being very new would be challenging but it is clearly the future of low power wireless communication for home automation.

Set a goal that NOTHING requires a external service or internet connection and stick to it. That might mean giving up on some types of devices but it’s YOUR house, not google’s.

Think automation first. Phone and voice control is cool. But having things just happen the way you would want without have to do anything is even cooler. Be smart about complexity though. How would things have to change if your partner started working a different schedule for instance?

Finally, get creative. Lots of silly problems can be solved with this technology. My favorite automation turns the damn hot glue gun off after 30min so my kids don’t start a fire if they get forgetful after a craft project.

All computers are named after dogs. My dogs, dogs in the family etc. the dog name should be carefully match to the computer’s role and characteristics.

My peerlessly reliably golden retriever will almost always have a server named after him. The most powerful computer in the house is named after the monstrously large golden my parents had when I was young. My sons gaming pc is fast but perpetually broken, named after our greyhound. Laptops are named for smaller dogs, SBC devices get named after toy size dogs.

Wi-Fi ssids should always be named after cats.

This is the natural way of things.