I have a supposedly smart washing machine that came with the apartment. Setting it up in my locked down appliances network, it didn’t work with home-assistant, required cloud access and wanted me to open up ports in the firewall. Nope. No network connection for you. You are a regular dumb old washing machine.
Yeah, it’s totally a fun feature driven project reliant on community efforts despite there is a commercial venture behind it nowadays. The core devs still treat it as their baby hobby project and nobody wants to do the boring job of maintaining a stable branch so it’s not going to happen.
Some while ago I saw another discussion on this topic that was shot down with the opposing arguments that all users have to do is stay up date with the latest version, while also saying that users are at fault for things breaking because they update when a notification tells them that there is a new latest version.
I think it’s arrogant and irresponsible and a ticking time bomb for a big time bug or zero day exploit and not how any serious project should be administered.
I wish I could have Linus Torvalds give his colorful opinion on this mindset on developing the operating system for peoples homes.
Every time I read of issues like this, I so much wish ha devs could be bothered to complement the rolling release as it is today with a quarterly “stable” branch that gets all the bug fixes and patches but none of the monthly new features.
The stable branch could lag 3 months in features, it doesn’t matter with latest features when all you want is a recently patched and updated system that runs your house without going bzzpth.
The big question is, how un/reliable are these drives.
Performing sufficiently for cheap production cost, they’d be a low RISC high reward investment.