I think point number three is likely what Deckwise is getting at. Every distro is stable when you don’t update it. I generally measure the stability of a distro on the ability to blindly update without taking out something mission critical.

Just commenting to say I thoroughly enjoy your choice of username. Loved that little joke.

I remember printing out the Gentoo installation manual in the compsci lab way back in 2004. It was my first Linux distro and have fond memories of tinkering around on it. I remember leaving it a few years later for a cool new distro that was on the rise called Ubuntu. I still think portage is one of the better approaches to package management though.

These plaintiffs would be better off sueing the companies of these websites for ignoring privacy laws and continuing to add tracking scripts to their sites.

That’s precisely what these people are doing. They’re not suing Google because Chrome doesn’t prevent these sites from building profiles and tracking users even while in Incognito Mode, but because Google themselves are engaging in such privacy invasive tactics.

I think it comes down to what you want to do with these things. You’re just getting into home automation, so I would plan on whatever choice you make now not being a reflection of where you end up on your journey.

The kasa devices don’t have great open firmware support but do offer a low level api for integration into things like home assistant. I’d personally lean towards it, but that’s mostly because I deal with software for a living and feel I can get enough value out of how it integrates with things in both the tinker space and out of the box.

If you’re more interested in tinkering at the firmware lev though it looks like the sonoff is the one to get. They’re ultimately just a plug you can turn on/off and monitor the energy usage with so however you end up tinkering, it’s a gateway into the larger home automation.

Absolutely, though it’s one of the main communication protocols, so I would imagine their numbers to increase. It seems like the HomeKit specific vendors like Eve have gone all in on it in preparation for Matter.

I mean, the obvious thing here is that “it just works” compared to flashing (and knowing how to flash) custom firmware onto devices. In my mind there are two big things that Matter has going for it:

1. Local-only support. If a device supports Matter it needs to be fully controllable locally per the specification.
2. Thread support. All the perks of zigbee and z-wave with the benefits of a much more reliable and robust network thanks to its mesh design. Every Matter device can act as a relay for any other Matter device. The only thing that needs to talk to anything over the LAN (or internet) is a border router.

Those two things aside, Matter is open source. It was formerly ProjectCHIP. So, if the device has the correct hardware to support Matter (not all current IoT devices have the necessary hardware) in theory open source firmware for those devices should be easier to develop.

There’s a setting for this in the next release of lemmy: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/commit/b8ee9315bc95d647c609c89d5d38e1d19574fb4b