With billions of batteries in use there are going to be plenty of complaints about issues. My specific experience is with an ancient Dell Venue convertible that’s been in regular use for 9 years with charge limiting applied that entire time. The battery still looks new and for what it’s worth, Dell’s UEFI reports it’s in excellent condition. This while the rest of the system including the charging port is completely worn out and at the end of its useful life. That computer is running Debian 12, HA and Frigate with only 4gb of ram and (outside the physical problems of a very old, heavily used laptop) is working fine.

Are the computers you have bought from Aliexpress UL listed, or do they have a European safety listing? I’ve read reports of some equipment and appliances sold by Chinese companies on various sites (including Amazon) causing fires. Not that those mean that much though. Even my UL listed Cyberpower UPS has had reports of internal shorts and fires.

There are literally billions of lithium batteries in use and you have a better chance of being struck by lightning that having a lithium battery fire. Your concern about the battery life isn’t realistic either. These batteries last for many years when the charge is limited to less than 100% and can be replaced when they finally wear out. If you run a UPS you’ll eventually need to replace those batteries too and your backup time will be usually be measured in minutes rather than hours.

As far as the ram limitation is concerned, it’s plenty for a supported Home Assistant installation and that’s exactly what this post is about.

Every machine has advantages and disadvantages, but I’m not sure why having a screen and a battery fall into the disadvantage category. The Aliexpress machines have some serious disadvantages including fans and an almost complete lack of support for most of them. And long-term support is a fantasy.

Dell sucks in many ways, but their support is in English and they produce firmware updates for several years after a product is released, especially for machines used by enterprise customers like this one.

Besides, if you add a UPS (and they all have batteries) to any of those Aliexpress mini PC’s you’re well over the price for this machine even with a gigabit Ethernet adapter.

For me $70 extra for a silent system with display, keyboard, UPS, a real warranty, and long-term support is a bargain.

Interesting, that sounds much more complex than using some backup software to image the drive!

I’ve found it to be simpler. Booting off a USB SSD allows full disk cloning to that same SSD without worrying about mounted partitions or using a separate USB thumb drive for Clonezilla. Once booted I can access the machine through SSH or NoMachine to create the backup and it is far faster than backing up to a network drive. For incremental backups Timeshift works fine.

The screen and keyboard are invaluable for backups. I have a portable SSD with Ubuntu installed for creating backups, but I often have to manually set the boot device on startup to get it to work. Setting a USB SSD for the first boot device in the BIOS/UEFI doesn’t seem to work reliably on any of my systems.

The point of a UPS or equivalent is to protect the SSD during a power failure. I’ve lost Raspberry Pi configurations several times due to power failures when I’m away from the house. It has been a major PITA and time consuming to recover from.

The one I have draws about 6 watts when running Home Assistant which means at $0.25 per KWH it would cost $1.10 per month to run. Just adding a UPS to any other platform is going to cost more per month and have a much shorter run time.

I was using Z2M and found it had some weird, unresolvable device control quirks with a dimmer I’m using. Switched to ZHA and have had no problems at all.

Intuit has been paying off our elected officials for decades to prevent the IRS from creating an online filing system. They have directly cost the American public probably hundreds of millions of dollars, and if there was any justice they’d be forced into bankruptcy.

For owners and potential customers of either brand it most certainly is.

There is zero excuse for Kia and Hyundai to have dragged this out for so long. Being expected to park your car outside, away from other vehicles can create some real difficulties, financial and otherwise for impacted owners. Those who live in urban cores with limited parking and people who live in areas with high levels of vehicle crime are particularly vulnerable.

Is an owner who parks in an underground residential garage or parks in a garage for work supposed to park miles away and take a cab back and forth? Are Hyundai & Kia going to pay for the damage caused by break-ins and vandalism because the car had to be parked on the street instead of inside a secure garage? Are these cars just supposed to be parked in a lot somewhere and not driven until Hyundai and Kia get around to correcting the defects in the cars they’ve sold?

These companies need to be subject to a nice, multi-million dollar class-action lawsuit.

Oh look, another pathological liar and malignant narcissist in a leadership position at the GQP. They should start a choir.

Britt is already doubling down:

“The story Senator Britt told was 100 percent correct. And there are more innocent victims of that kind of disgusting, brutal trafficking by the cartels than ever before right now. The Biden administration’s policies — the policies in this country that the president falsely claims are humane — have empowered the cartels and acted as a magnet to a historic level of migrants making the dangerous journey to our border.” – Sean Ross, spokesman for Sen. Katie Britt.

Now the orange shitgibbon and the rest of the GQP is angry, no furious, that Biden was “on drugs.” LOL!

Not sure why that’s such a controversial thought.

Really? You’re not sure? Let me spell it out for you.

You are repeatedly doing your whining about a post that is labeled as OPINION in the title. It is the very first word and you’re in a Politics community (for fuck’s sake) where damn near everything is opinion. What’s more, you want everyone else on Lemmy to follow your instructions and place posts you object to in a separate community. That kind of arrogance is astounding.

Hope that helps.

What fucking nonsense.

These are the pieces that feel like they’re designed to be dramatic, and push that feeling onto the readers.

WTF? So you object to an opinion piece that is clearly labeled to being published at all? Or you object the fact that some other opinion pieces aren’t labeled as such which has nothing at all to do with this post?

They’re not fact-based pieces, yet still get published alongside fact-based pieces on MSNBC.

Have you ever read a newspaper? Opinions, marked as such, have been published right along news since long before you or I were born.

Do you expect opinions to be put on a entirely separate website? Perhaps a brand new .opinion domain suffix should be made because you think that understanding an opinion piece clearly labeled as such is actually opinion is too much of a strain.

Weirder you say you’ve seen it everywhere. Mainstream media - NYT, NBC, CNN and WA Post have no mention of it.

Can you imagine the wall to wall coverage had it been Biden who called his wife by the wrong name? It would go on for weeks.

Because it’s Trump they’ll be nary a peep about this from the “liberal” media.

Edit: Confirmed this morning - not a word about Trump’s demented rambling on the front pages of CNN, NBC, NYT or WA Post. The GQP front-runner’s inability to string a coherent sentence together or remember his wife’s name should be front page news. If Biden tripped over a mic stand it would be.

Doesn’t mean their systems are not up to date…

IMO we will never know. Every company has a vested interest in hiding the cause of a breach if it makes them look bad.