Creative ingenuity and the ability to cram a network stack into the smallest of things have gifted us, over the past few years, some pretty funky home innovations. Legacy (classical?) home dwellers may see little merit in upgrading to a Smart Home, but we have some uniquely Linux ideas that may persuade them.
Having a smart home needn’t mean having Alexa (the voice of Amazon’s Echo) eavesdropping on your every word. Nor does it mean the nameless entity within a Google Assistant reporting back to the mothership whenever you leave the bathroom light on. The Mycroft home assistant can do all the good bits of these voice devices, but without the more chilling data-collection aspects. Best of all you can run Mycroft on a Raspberry Pi.