this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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homeassistant
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Home Assistant is open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server. Available for free at home-assistant.io
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You bought a laptop to run home assistant?? Why? Why not just a random thinclient for ~50€?
Different people have different use cases. A thin client doesn't work for video object recognition, nor does it come with a keyboard, display, SSD or battery backup.
They usually do come with SSD. If you need object recognition, there are ones with an PCIe slot for a gpu.
But I am honestly not sure why you need a keyboard and display on a server.
When I bought this laptop the cheap thin clients came with eMMC storage. Keyboard and display are convenient for installations, backups and occasionally other uses. A decent size UPS is more than $100, uses power even when it's in standby and still doesn't last anywhere near the 7+ hours of the laptop battery when the power fails. I'm away for 3-4 weeks at a time and have had repeated power failures completely corrupt my server SSD during that time. Not everyone can fix a server problem within a few hours.
The laptop cost significantly less than a thin client, plus a gpu, plus a UPS and came with that nice keyboard and display, and a warranty. It only uses about 6-8 watts the majority of the time, important to me for a device that's always on.
Different people have different use cases than you do. Some of us even know what works best for us.
Maybe they want to be able to type things into it and look at the output without having to go over the network.