[georgehotelling]

> I refuse to buy into somebody's walled garden

That's actually why I landed on Home Assistant. It's Open Source so I know that if things ever go bad someone will fork it and I won't have invested deeply in a dead-end ecosystem.

Getting started for me felt like the first time I learn a new board game. The rules seem incomprehensible and everything is unfamiliar, but that's the price of trying something new. Eventually the concepts started to click and I saw how things fit together.

I will say that telling my spouse to install an app with a web GUI was much easier than it would have been to get her on IRC to control the house.