Just last time it was free:ac; I had to change to system scaling because it would be unreadable otherwise, and that in turn fucked up Steam that I had managed to configure properly before.
As someone using Wayland on a HiDPI screen it’s not a great experience with legacy apps. You can’t completely rely on application-controlled scaling since not all apps support it and if you switch to system-wide scaling everything looks like crap.
It’s fairly common to give a (sense of) a good deal to new people while raising a bit more money roght now than you would with a traditional subscription.
Then later when you start getting more users quicker you cancel that offer and nee users have to use a subscription (which will make you more money over time).
Protonmail did something similar originally, giving out Visionary for life for a (large) one-time fee. It’s a decent strategy to raise money from people who believe in your product.
Which, as I understand it, is kinda the point of the bills too. As in, if there is documentation and it’s reasonably easy to dis- and re-assemble, there can be a (bigger) market for spare parts.
There is nothing experimental about self-hosting Zigbee stuff. It’s an open protocol, so as long as the devices follow it (at least somewhat correctly) you can work with it.
And the actual “hard work” has already been done by others - Zigbee2MQTT, for example, supports over 3000 devices, so the ground work of having device definitions with easy use has already been done. What Matter aims to do is to provide standards for devices so that they all have some minimal basic functionality, expose the same fields in the same way, etc. so you don’t need a hand-maintained library like that. There isn’t even really a reason to be skeptical; considering all this stuff already works well enough, it can only get better.
It can definitely be hard or tiring, but you wouldn’t be an early adopter. It’s like saying that switching to Linux now (or even 15 years ago) would make you an early adopter. It wouldn’t; it already works, plenty people have done it, but that doesn’t mean it won’t get better with time or that it’s easy or for everyone.
Or if you are technically inclined you can buy Zigbee or Z-Wave stuff, get your own dongle for it and run Home Assistant on your home server, and do everything 100% locally and it can still be really “smart”. You can also do anything with it. But it’s definitely not for everyone.
Hopefully Thread/Matter will help with this, which is an initiative to make interoperable smart home … stuff.
Doesn’t help that middle management feels threatened since it is becoming obvious that nobody needs them. You can pretend like you’re working when people are in the office, but suddenly when noone needs you?