Yes, I’m quite sure that I’ve been obnoxious for many. However, I feel the argument “if you don’t like, go do it yourself” does not advance the conversation as a community.
Maybe let me rephrase the comment I did. I’m wrong saying that the community doesn’t want some changes, however, I don’t think they share the same mindset on how important/indispensable they are.
what do you think other programs rely on?
the configuration must be saved somehow.
that can be YAML, inifiles, databases, etc.
do you prefer another type of file to put the config in?
the choices you have are: restricted, not modifyable or YAML or JSON.
which would you prefer?
Yes, it would be as bad for the user.
We just don’t know if the idea is to address this “issue” soon or it’s something for later on the project.
It’s an “issue” that will get fixed “when someone gets around to it”. If someone thinks it should be a high priority, they can start writing the code to implement it.
Being open source, it’s just waiting on someone to come along and think that it’s enough of a need that they start working on it. You seem really adamant about it being a necessity. Have you thought about learning how to write an interface? 
I really wish I could. Complaining was my way to maybe encourage some of our developers to take a look at it, or at least tell their ideas.
Also, my ideas might sound too radical for the project.
Complaining doesn’t encourage anyone.
Yes, but that’s what user feedback is about. Is just seem to be a touchy subject since is open source.
I feel that a lot of people don’t express their opinion because if you complaining a lot of times your opinion are minimized to “if you don’t like, go do it yourself” or “it’s free, is not supposed to be as good as a commercial option, go buy one”.
Even with that, I do appreciate your encouragement towards me contributing to the project.
You see, there is a fine line here. Feedback is important. Complaining is annoying, but constructive criticism is welcome. It’s all about the attitude used to relay such messages.
Sure it is. These kind folks give up their personal time to provide us with free software that makes OUR lives easier in the long run.
Welcome to Open Source. It has been this way forever. There is a reason it is open source. You simply cannot COMPLAIN about your free software. If you want to make it better, you have to contribute. Standing on the sidelines yelling about what you hate doesn’t get ANYTHING done. Step up to the plate, or help coach the game, don’t sit around yelling about how it COULD be better if the people playing the game would only do what YOU say.
Contributions come from many forms. If you cannot write code, you can report bugs, and help improve documentation. Even feature requests are welcome, however, please have an idea in mind for what you would like to see. Don’t just say “WE NEED A GUI FOR ADDING DEVICES!” and leave it at that. Creating UI/UX is the most complicated part of developing software. Developers tend to have a hard time visualizing good UI/UX. Sometimes they need help with that. Present IDEAS, even if they are just mockups of what you think it should look like. Get together with others that feel the same way, and start hashing out what the community would like to see.
Contribution is the most vital aspect to open source projects.
Thanks
I did not mean to offend anyone. If I did I’m sorry.
I did present some ideas in this post. From the reception I need better ones 
I think it’s more that you came in waving the I’m right, you’re wrong banner, and keep waving it. That automatically makes people not want to listen.
That’s not to say that you’re wrong and “we” are right. Far from it, hidden amongst your posts are many valid points. Unfortunately you’ve been overwhelmingly negative, rather than helping find and develop solutions. If you can turn your approach to being constructive, you have the potential to turn your passion on the topic to the good of the project.
I don’t know if I can add value to this thread, but a couple of years ago, I’ve been searching for a turn-key open-source solution for having a home automation server in Linux. There isn’t none, so I’ve devoted my time to learn Home Assistant. I tried openHAB, but it isn’t as easy as compared to Home Assistant despite getting Insteon PLM Hub (1st gen) to work but there’s no component for Home Assistant at the time of writing. But before I try Home Assistant and openHAB, I’ve written my own project using nothing more than HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for controlling Philips Hue lights.
What I can say is if you can learn to code HTML, you can learn Home Assistant. But if you want a GUI for doing all the configuring, there’s SmartThings or HomeSeer (Windows) or Indogo (Mac) but these don’t come cheap.
So we can all agree that we need to give developers’ time to improve Home Assistant. But if we could learn Python and Polymer and can write a GUI for configuration for it, so much the better. We all need to give developers constructive feedback and keep our community civil. If we complain, we are heading in the wrong direction. “I’m right; you’re wrong” attitude will set a negative image for Home Assistant as a project and a community as a whole.
We are a community and we can make Home Assistant better. Home Assistant deserves to be loved by those who devote their time to get their home automation system setup and running. We welcome Konnected for bringing in their Konnected Alarm Panel to Home Assistant and I’m far too enthusiastic to get one of those. Home Assistant should be given some love as well, so why not we turn complaints about Home Assistant into constructive feedback and if any one of you is a developer or are learning to write Python code, step up and help make Home Assistant better for all of us and developers.
This topic was automatically opened after 23 hours.
I have read the thread, but will adress the original topic; Who is HA for?
In my opinion, HA is best suited for people who like tinkering and settings things up exactly the way they want it (and don’t mind too much if their settings occasionally break as HA gets updated).
Sorry for the rant. But this is my way to tell the developers that I want home assistant to be accessible to everyone.
This is a point I disagree on, HA is not the best product for everyone, and it shouldn’t have to be as far as i’m concerned. People are different and have different preferences. Personally I like working with text configurations.
A pure text configuration have advantages you usually don’t get with gui settings. If something has 100 options but you only need to change one it it much easier to see and implement that change in a text file. It also makes it easy to keep a history over all your changes. You can also share your configuration both in part or in full, and benefit from others that have done so.
Yes, yaml configuration is tricky to get started with, but looking at the documentation and other peoples configurations should get you far.
Of course it’s not all good. It often take time setting things up and you may need to restart HA to verify your settings, but this has become better in the last year, and it also gets better with experience.
There are alternatives out there to that can be better to start with if a gui configuration is prefered.
Domoticz is a really good home automation system that can get you far without writing code. I started with Domoticz and I still think it have advantages over HA in certain aspects, but it also have limitations in other ways.
I don’t want to scare people away from HA, but I think it’s good to explore the alternatives and find what’s best for you. It may be HA, it may be something else. Also, what is best for you may change over time.
I just came across this topic. I know it is older but wanted to say my bit.
I have tried Homeseer (paid software) Vera (paid appliance) Domoticz (free software) OpenHAB (free software) and Home Assistant (free software).
I wanted specific things, including a really cool looking wake up alarm clock that integrated hue lamps (colour) and some audio.
Homeseer was just a mess trying to implement it and could never get it right. I was confused on how to set up the required service calls and the room configuration, although simple enough, was archaic and just darn ugly.
Vera. again, could not do what I wanted. Great if you want something a little more advanced than smart things, but only want simple automations for your home. It didn’t do what I wanted.
Domoticz: Development was too far behind, The component integration and support for newer devices just was not there. I also found the Zwave implementation a little unstable.
OpenHAB: I used version 2 and although the UI is really nice, PaperUI is far from prime time and should be beta still. You can do a lot if you are more of a JAVA programmer, but it is a steep technical learning curve. The other issue is automations created in PaperUI are stored somewhere completely separate to the files if you create manual automations.
OpenHAB works great and device support was great, I just found the structure of having two basically separate, and sometimes competing, ways of configuring a little too messy.
Home Assistant: This is the one I stuck to. It is not designed for someone who wants to do basic stuff in a GUI, though there are some GUI configs available, but you still need to understand JSON.
Home Assistant did one thing none of the others did. It detected devices automatically and added most of my devices to the UI within minutes. OpenHAB is easy to add devices, but it was totally manual addition, nothing automatic (when I tried it).
The ones that didn’t detect automatically in Home Assistant were well documented. YMMV, this is just my experience.
I am a bit tech savvy, but I found OpenHAB too much of a learning curve. YAML, used by Home Assistant, is picky about spacing and can be annoying, but for the flexibility of being able to do what I wanted, something commercial products still can not do, I can tolerate the quirks of YAML. They are rather easy to work around and there are a ton of examples and youtube videos. Home Assistant and OpenHAB seem to be the only options flexible enough to do the more complex alarm I wanted, while still being easily maintainable by someone at home.
The expensive, professional systems may do similar things (or may not) but I don’t want to pay someone hundreds or even thousands of dollars to install something I then have little to no control over. If something breaks in Home Assistant I can most times revert to a backup snapshot or fix it, I don’t have to pay anyone to do it.
Sure, it is not ready for Grandma, but it is one of the best out there if you are willing to dig in a bit and learn.
My Install took me about 2 to 3 hours of initial setup, plus maybe another hour of tweaking, and has a good WAF.
.
WAF was lacking in most other solutions (OpenHAB excepted).
Who is it best for: Judge from the experience of others. It is for someone who wants to try and create the home of the future really. Someone willing to learn, experiment and sometimes have the odd failure. You don’t have to be a programming wizard or even know a lot of linux, even though Linux and Python experience definitely helps. You just have to have a bit of technical know how and apptitude towards learning this sort of thing.
Oh. A couple of things extra.
Did I mention that Home Assistant is FREE . The developers have created an incredibly sophisticated, powerful, customizable Home Automation Platform for free.
I think that is the key thing to remember here. This is not a glorified remote control with some basic automations like a lot of commercial products. It is a fully functional, powerful complete home automation solution that just can’t be compared to Smartthings and the like.
And it is free in both senses as in “beer” and as in “speech”.
The Home Assistant app (ios) is pretty good with gps as long as you have set up zones. Xiaomi in my opinion works better with Home Assistant than with their proprietary software. But these are just opinions.
I don’t have a dev background either, even worse I work as a bartender. I have succesfully set up Home Assistant though with a ton of automations.
You can get the code here if you please, but don’t just copy it 