Beginner friendly documentation

Feature Requests
141

In case of problems with deployment of vanila HA, should I debug problems or move to supervised stright way?
Because afaik I should try to solve installation problems by loging and checking what is happening.
I had problems installing Pi4 booting from SSD. I was doing test in different env, starting with WiFi instead of wired and had to dig into console. Are you suggesting I should go supervised instead of trying solve problems?

You can add authorized keys in the SSH addon to not use a password.

What is not understandable in “consistency” word?
I said, login command can be issued in some situations while it cannot other times. And documentation doesn’t explain it in clear way

This is why the documents for this assume you know what you’re doing.

Please stop assuming this way. People who know don’t need docs anymore. Don’t we talk about documentation improvement? SSH is needed for solving issues.

142

What you aren’t understanding is that these documents are complicated to deter beginner users from attempting to do this.

If you want to muck with the os, HomeAssistantOS install method is not for you. Period. These specific documents you are complaining about will never be updated so that any joe schmo can access them.

Again, if you want to adjust ANYTHING in the OS you should move to one of the following install methods:

HomeAssistant Container
HomeAssistant Core
HomeAssistant Supervised

If you don’t plan to muck with the OS use

HomeAssistant OS.

So…

YES

Moot point. You’re using the wrong installation method.

Absolutely not. You’re doing things that you shouldn’t be doing on HomeAssistant OS.

143

OK. trying to install OS5.2 to boot Pi from SSD is something I should not do on HomeAssistantOS.
Seems contradictory. It deserves to land in a signature.

144

Yep, now you understand. FWIW, I believe they are working on a way to make ssd boot possible in native HomeAssistantOS. You just have to be patient.

145

It is possible now. As I said with HAOS5.2.
The issue was I was testing it with WiFi connection. Because it was failing I needed to access OS to check what is happening. BTW containers weren’t even running at this point. So don’t say I should no dig in OS.

Second, I believe login command was able to be issued when I was starting with HA (a year ago). I’m not sure if it has been changed later or it is disabled by SSH add-on. The point is that no documentation mentions this relationship. This is THE information missing.

146

5.2 is a development build, so it may have issues

147

Again, what you’re doing is a work around. It. Will. Not. Be. Documented. By. The. Devs.

The end goal of HomeAssistantOS is that no user has to muck with the OS.

Best case scenario is a community guide.

148

I think we need to get back on track with the intent of the thread and not let it led by discussion of installation methods that are still in development

1 Like
149

It wasn’t my intention to talk about installation methods. It was just reasons why I needed to look at OS. Other reason was changing user password.

Initially i was pointing to missing information about:
when login command works without credentials and when desn’t at all. It’s because it obviously changes over time and one might experience both behaviours having no idea why it happens.

150

What an excellent explanation! Not only did you explain what, you explained why. I wish all the docs were like this.

1 Like
151

It’s not advisable to assign the ‘new guy’ to document how the rocket engine works …

Will you comment on the oddities in the PR so it ships with correct info?

You may have noticed that I have already commented. In addition, your scheduling priorities are not mine.

Or you could rewrite it …

Because I commented, now I ought to rewrite your document. Good example of the adage: No good deed goes unpunished.

2 Likes
152

I have to agree with Taras, you really need to get used to HA first, before attempting to write docs for it.

Don’t get me wrong, I really appreciate your effort, but when I read your doc for the first time, most of the things were incorrect and Taras and others here just completely rewrote the incorrect parts, which I of course appreciate as well.

1 Like
153

Hey yall, I got great detailed feedback on the PR, so I’m going to focus my attention there. No need to help if you don’t want to.

My 2 cents on the community as a newcomer: I got a really positive warm response from everyone on discord and github (thank you @frenck @tom_l NKDZCK), but I found this thread really discouraging. Just food for thought.

154

If you are talking about me, I just wanted to give you an advice to make this easier for you. I’m sorry if I offended/discouraged you in any way.

155

Same, I find the docs lacking the basic information needed, no examples, and both the docs and forum are full of outdated info.

The beginners docs and overall experience of Initial setup are well done, it is the moment you finish installation and setup and wish to use a particular integration that the troubles start. Learning the basic concepts as your pr would help, but also examples for each integration on their Doc pages.

Thanks for putting the time in to help.

156

After thinking about your comment for awhile, you are correct that the content is what is important. Again how do I know that the content is still correct for the current version of HA? With all the great integrations, I am constantly trying new (to me) stuff. I always look to the published docs to see what needs to be done to implement the new integration. Sometimes it works but many times it doesn’t. It could be that I don’t understand the documentation, the documentation is no longer valid or the document is incorrect.
Today I tried to follow tts with google. Following the documentation did not work. Luckily for me Tinkerer was able to help me very quickly in the discord chat and he is modifying the documentation.