Technology

TLDR: works fine.

https://python-kasa.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cli.html#kasa-help works to provision. No stupid app. 

Got a https://thepihut.com/collections/latest-raspberry-pi-products/products/home-assistant-skyconnect and need to pass it through to your HA virtual machine ? The VM will be using lxc, because all the other ways are terrible.

My understanding is you shouldn't use linuxserver's Home Assistant image as this is only "HA Core", so you can never use addons. Maybe you don't need them now, maybe you do, but locking yourself in seems poor. 

It's fairly easy to get the PPC talking to a modern computer. This lets you do cool tricks like Toot from it by using things like https://github.com/ihabunek/toot on the host

All the advice on articles like https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/47080/mounting-iso-in-linux-kde don't work in modern KDE, or are about mounting .iso files, which is now built in, or a disk image as read only.

I needed to mount disk images read/write, which appears to be more complicated because it needs to run as root, so prompt for the password, fingerprint or what have you.

Recently I got around to playing with an Amstrad PPC I'd had for a while but not tried to get running. I even had the thin version of the manual, ruck sack, power supply and half the system disks.

The good news is - it's easy ! I'm not even a hardware guy :)