I run Home Assistant OS bare-metal on a used HP EliteDesk 800 G4 mini PC, no virtualisation, no cloud, and I treat every monthly release like a small weather front rolling in: usually welcome, occasionally bringing a leak I have to mop up. The June drop, Home Assistant 2026.6 “Pick a card, any card”, landed on the 3rd, and the headline feature is one I’ve quietly wanted for years. So I upgraded the morning it came out, poured a coffee, and went looking for the catch. There is one. More on that below.
The card picker finally asks the right question
For as long as I’ve used Home Assistant, adding a card to a dashboard meant being shown a wall of card types — entities card, glance, tile, gauge, history-graph — and being expected to already know which one I wanted before I’d even decided what I was trying to show. It’s backwards, and every beginner I’ve helped has tripped over it.
2026.6 flips the question. Instead of “which card type?”, the new picker asks “which thing in your home do you want to show?” You browse by entity or by area, pick the thing, and Home Assistant suggests cards that actually make sense for it — each one rendered as a live preview using your data, before you commit. No more add-it, squint-at-it, delete-it, try-the-next-one. On mobile it splits into a clean two-step flow: pick the entity, then pick the card. Custom cards can opt into this too; if one you’ve installed has signed up, its suggestions appear under a separate Community section. It’s the kind of change that doesn’t add a feature so much as remove a thousand tiny frustrations.
The weather tile earns its spot on the wall
The tile card picked up two genuinely useful weather tricks. There’s now a temperature forecast that draws a little bar chart of the coming days’ highs and lows, coloured from cool cyan up to deep red, and a precipitation forecast that shows expected rain or snow per slot. I’ve had a weather entity sitting on my hallway dashboard for ages doing nothing but printing a number; it now actually tells me whether to grab a jacket at a glance. The media player tile got some love in the same release, which I care about less, but it’s there.
IR remotes that listen, and sirens that behave
This is the one that made me grin. After being teased across the last couple of releases — 2026.5 was literally titled “We’re on the same frequency now” — infrared remotes can finally receive signals, not just blast them out. For a local-first setup that’s a real unlock: I can point an old physical remote at a receiver and use its button presses as automation triggers, no cloud round-trip, no vendor app. That’s exactly the kind of thing that keeps me on this platform.
On the protocol side, Matter sirens now show up as proper siren entities you can switch on and off from automations and dashboards, and Z-Wave gained smart-lock credential management. The automation editor also got quietly smarter: live condition tests and target counts while you’re building, plus an “Add to” button on entity and device pages that spins up a new automation with that entity pre-filled as a trigger, condition, or action. Small things, but they shave minutes off every automation I write.
The honest part: my “By Card” tab came up empty
Here’s the leak. The shiny new picker has a “By Entity” tab and a “By Card” tab, and for a chunk of us the By Card tab loaded completely blank — no cards listed at all — and, more annoyingly, pasting a card I’d copied to the clipboard stopped working. I’m not the only one; there’s an active community thread reporting exactly this, “Since 2026.6 By Card Picker empty and paste function broken.” The By Entity flow worked perfectly for me, so it didn’t block anything, but if you lean on copy-paste to clone cards between dashboards — I do, constantly — it’s a real papercut.
For what it’s worth, clearing the browser cache and doing a hard reload sorted the empty tab on one of my machines but not the other, which points at a frontend issue rather than anything in my config. I’d expect a point release to clean it up. This is also the reason I never upgrade a production instance blind: I keep a full snapshot from before the update so rolling back is a two-minute job, not a panic. If you haven’t built that habit yet, build it before you touch 2026.6.
Should you upgrade?
Yes — but on your terms. The card picker alone makes dashboard work meaningfully nicer, the weather tiles are a quiet delight, and IR receive is a proper local-first win. None of it is essential, none of it breaks your existing dashboards, and the one rough edge has a workaround and a fix surely on the way. Take a snapshot, read the full changelog for breaking changes that touch your specific integrations, and then enjoy it. That’s the whole local-first bargain: you own the timing, you own the rollback, and nobody pushes anything to your house that you didn’t choose.
I’ll report back if 2026.6.x changes anything worth knowing. For now it’s running happily on the EliteDesk, fan barely audible, doing exactly what I asked of it.
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