I get why you would think that given that many devices can just have their power cut without consequences. As pointed out, it’s entirely about the SD card. It’s common knowledge in the RPi community, but many new RPi users unfortunately don’t realize this until it’s too late (as in this case).
I’m currently working on a rewrite of the openHABian documentation, and am planning to mention this for the benefit of new users.
Correct, unless you’re on the version of openHABian that schedules a daily cron job (as Udo mentioned). But more than that, I recommend a small UPS that can keep your RPi and modem/router going for a short period of time.
Note that Network UPS Tools can now be installed from openHABian-config. I haven’t tried this myself, so I haven’t updated the tutorial yet.
This depends on your point of view. I’d agree that openHABian presents this way to the new user, but it’s actually just Raspberry OS Lite with scripts to install openHAB and some other software. So, we kind of need to separate the three main elements that you get from the image:
- Raspberry OS Lite.
- openHABian-config, a program for simple configuration of services and software, accessed through the Linux command line.
- openHAB, a program that is accessed through a web interface.
That’s why it doesn’t make sense for Main UI to have built-in shutdown/reboot commands–for all it knows, it could be running on Windows (where sudo poweroff does nothing).
If we were to make comparisons with a TV box, openHAB is equivalent to the YouTube app. We wouldn’t expect YouTube to be able to reboot/poweroff a TV.
But as you say, it’s nice not having to SSH into the RPi to shut it down. So…