I can confirm most of the people who say and believe this shit don't have a clue what they're talking about and just want to appear superior to others.

Sr IT engineer here. I've somehow come full circle and now have an entire smarthome setup. It's running on a IoT network so it can't see my other devices, but I'm sure that some poor Amazon employee has to watch me walk around in my underwear from my robot vacuum camera. I just don't care anymore.

I have smart lights because I like the light to get warmer throughout the day but that's it, does anyone have a foss solution? Google is unhelpful.

I’m one bad day away from going Amish.

Maybe. I'm in cyber security, people tell me I'm pretty decent at it. I have smart everything in my house, but I also use opnSense in my hardware router, have a span port to Security Onion and laugh at the logs, repurpose old desktops as servers for media or whatever, keep most things local except for a few backups, and have battery/UPS backups for my intranet and critical systems.

Yes to all of the above

At some point, you just realize that in no project, there is enough budget to do even just mediocre security or correctness. And the few projects that actually require certifications for that, they rely on technology so old that it's hard to believe they'd actually fulfill these criteria either.

And then you realize that you're already considered an expensive expert. That companies try to further cut down on costs by outsourcing to basically untrained workers or, hell, LLMs.

I think of the cost. My smart home stuff gets hacked on it's own network and then? Oh no, you can turn my lights off

I know a guy who works in IT tech support and he always seems to be one of the least tech savvy people that I know.

My entire family, 20+ people, multiple generations, are pretty much all CS/engineers. We all have smart home shit that depends on wifi etc.

Mostly true. I haven’t owned a printer since 2012.

I use ZWave with Home Assistant for every light switch and fan in my house. It integrates with Google Assistant, but not bound to it. Google's server connects to my Home Assistant device for control, not the other way around.

The most troublesome devices I have are are some light+fan modules that use WiFi because they run on Tuya. There is really no other alternative and it fails all the time.

Avoid WiFi devices as much as possible, especially those that require Internet. Even Bluetooth is better.

Never use SmartThings. Samsung's AWS-based servers may go down in Europe and lock you out of control. They're just overall flaky to the point I've had to reverse engineer some protocols to control my previous home's mini-splits locally. My current Samsung fridge stops reporting to Home Assistant randomly and I've given up trying to maintain it.

DDI engineer here. I use smart home stuff. Fully kitted out locks, cameras, Google home, smart lights, etc. that said, I also use pfsense, a dmvpn, and run a private caching name server. If someone hacks into my shit, then I deserve it and will learn from the experience. Also yes, I know the Google home, smart tv, FBI, and the Zoroaster prophet are listening to me, and no, I don't care.