Genuinely.

I’m not sure why people are saying this is a waste of time and it’s just a name, because the truth is, names matter!.

“Cloud” and all the associated vendor lock-in and data-selling etc is exactly what most people using HA are trying to escape from, and so Home Assistant ‘Cloud’ gave completely the wrong impression.

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The normal consumer smartphone pairing flow uses Bluetooth on the phone to do the initial device pairing after you scan the QR code.

You just aren’t made aware of that as the user.

The on-server flow also needs Bluetooth therefore, and all that’s different is you manually type the numbers from the QR instead of using the camera to scan :)

When I did it, this also involved switching to the beta version because the functionality to use a Bluetooth proxy was kinda new. But I guess we’re past that now, hooray~

Commissioning Matter devices using Graphene may not work due to the commissioning flow requiring Google Play Services.

I had that problem. If your Home Assistant instance itself has Bluetooth, you can use the manual flow to work around it:

In HA:

Settings -> Connectivity -> Matter -> Options -> Add Manually

There you can type the 11 digit code from your matter device (exactly as it appears, including hyphens) and it will add it without needing a phone.

As mentioned though, your HA instance needs Bluetooth for this. My HA is in a virtual machine so plugging a dongle was less than ideal. I solved it instead using a esp32 Bluetooth proxy over Ethernet.

https://esphome.io/components/bluetooth_proxy/

You may(?) also need to set up Matter to use that bluetooth device. There’s some reading on it here which could be useful

https://smarthomescene.com/guides/add-matter-devices-home-assistant-without-phone/

Good luck! :)

I’m glad I set it up, because being ‘forced’ to use a google/apple phone for setting up matter on my local network feels like a really stinky pattern. I’m glad I don’t need to :)

As soon as Windows runs on Linux :)

Exactly.

It’s not “randomly recommending an operating system”

It’s noticing when people have problems, and providing a solution.

My biggest peeve with JSON when I’m forced to use it as a configuration format is that it doesn’t have any syntactical support for comments.

So I can’t even add any notes to the file.