It’s a feature not a bug. A feature to maximize profits for of the vendors that create your hardware that is.

For vendors a so called vendor lock-in is a great way to make money. Unfortunately they have an incentive to make their stuff not work well with other stuff because that may mean that you’ll buy more of their stuff.

Now, in some cases they have to implement compatibility, because otherwise they’d have trouble getting customers int he first place, but in it’s often obvious that playing well with others isn’t a priority.

Hence solutions like home assistant rely on shoddy interfaces and that shows in the form of issues. Besides, it’s a volunteer driven application. You can’t expect the people who make it in their free time solve all the problems for you.

Edit: Basically, you will have to solve these issues step by step. Afaik they are all solvable. And of course you might want to rely on hardware that’s more standardized. E.g. onvif cameras. That’s not necessarily less of a hassle than with ring etc. but it’s cheaper.

Well, android itself is more or less a linux distribution since it’s based on linux kernel. The version that ends up on normal phones just isn’t FOSS.

So I would definitely count lingeageOS and other FOSS derivatives of android.

I use that as well. It’s great because google still give the best results and startpage (mostly) just proxies the requests to google.

That’s btw. the way most other alternative search engines work as well. E.g. ecosia is mostly bing.

In any case, I do trust startpage over duckduckgo, because they’re (more or less) European. I.e. would get into a lot more trouble when spying illegally.