I mean… you know they sold out to Aussie-Adobe like 4 years ago right?
They are currently strip-mining the code so they can learn how to write an application that isn’t an instagram filter tacked onto MS paint… I just made that last part up, hopefully they do something good… but I assume they acquired Serif for the sake of IP protection and not because they were hoping to develop it further. I haven’t seen anything innovative happen for the last few years at least.
Honestly didn’t expect a single other soul to remember that, so not late :-)
Remember working for like a week to get the audio drivers working so I could finally figure out how to properly pronounce “Linux…”
And I still couldn’t.
And we’ll send five dollars American to anyone who gets that reference*.
I’m going to pontificate a bit.
I get the impression that there just isn’t quite as much “just works” on offer as there use to be. In the 3ish years I’ve been playing with HA I’ve seen several of them vanish and not return. This has gone hand-in-hand with “improvements” in IoT security.
Personally I have no problem with insecure APIs on my local network. But I’m 20 years out of date, the threat landscape is infinitely more vast and people I’ve never met are looking to fuck my shit up for a fraction of 1 bitcoin ;-)
Secure local access shouldn’t really be a problem, but ultimately it will always require a non-zero amount of maintenance. Either from you (if you’re lucky) or the manufacturer (if they’re still in business).
Working off all that Zigbee is probably going to be your best bet. It just works pretty good, but I have yet to find a list of all the basics that always work perfectly for everyone. But most of it is cheap and plentiful enough that you can just try another device if needed.
Some folks seem to get away without repeaters, some don’t. So repeaters and devices don’t seem to be compatible, and that makes the notion of a self-healing automatically optimized mesh more of a theoretical ideal. Start with small test deployments and scale up gradually. RF isn’t easy, there’s going to be glitches. Devices with a graceful fallback are good… every bulb in your bedroom coming on at 3:00AM when the power hiccups may be an acceptable compromise to you, but might not be for the person you’re sleeping next to ;-)
And this has devolved into barely coherent rambling, so I’m out. Sorry I couldn’t answer your question, but hopefully I don’t completely waste your time.
As long as you’re doing it in a VM might as well try the MacOS version. IIRC the OS screen scaling and apples requirements that everything have vector or MIB mapped icons makes for a much nicer experience.
I don’t know if it works on a VM… just fondly remember using the apps on my MacBook 😅