I am trying to set few quite basic things for few months now. Often I just drop that idea and postpone for later out of frustration. Problem is that I do not find HA to be intuitive, easy to use, behaving as expected, documentation clear enough or whole system stable.
Debugging is also quite complicated, starting from reading logs or finding meaningful information n them.
I am talking as a beginner with HA, but my general it and system development expertise just makes more frustrations with HA.
How do you find it?
Also, does a HA need a refreshment on UI, as TBF it looks quite outdated.
P.S. HA is one of the best in what it is and I appreciate it being free and open source.
I use it constantly, it’s stable as hell once you fine tune everything. Think about the amount of integrating it does and it’s totally understandable. Way more reliable than anything offered by apple, alexa or google for that matter.
I’ve been using HA since 0.77.0 (so a long time) and yes, it’s convoluted and there’s odd bits and pieces floating around… BUT, given the breadth of it’s capabilities and how much it’s evolved, I wouldn’t say it isn’t intuitive. There’s just a learning curve, like any other piece of software that has been around for years.
C’mon… Why on earth are you using it then? It’s not compulsory.
Is it the best you can say? “Don’t use it if you don’t like…”
I’ve said it is one of the best, but it lacks lots of sometimes generic stuff. Second best is OpenHAB, but I am not using any of them reliably ATM TBF, because of their own quirks.
Yes, I’ve not used home automation systems before, but I could explain you how asynchronous IT systems work via message brokers, what are subscribers and what are publishers, what retry syrategies are used and so on.
But in HA it is a different story - I am just spending more time trying to identify why it does not work the way it would be a natural use case, and how to workaround that with a different solution.
And? Maybe I’ve decided that it is better to ask instead of going in loops via different solutions myself. But if you wish - we can discuss in details the other questions I’ve posted.
Because HA was never designed as enterprise software? It was an open source project dreamed up because the ones that were available (and there weren’t many besides OpenHAB and a couple of the big names) all pretty much sucked or required vendor lock-in. So, best practices and standards were a second thought during early development.
However, with that said, HA actually is mostly an async system. The frontend and backend are decoupled. It does use messaging brokers and does use the notion of subscribers and publishers. One only needs to read the source code to figure this out.
If you have that background, you know that with new stuff you have to be persistent, willing to spend some time and making errors.
If you’re not willing to accept that then HA is not for you.
By stating that the problem is with HA whereas so many people have jumped in WITHOUT any knowledge and are doing wonderful things, well …
I came here too without any knowledge about home automation.
I like what you said and agree with what you said regarding commercial vendor lock-in. I don’t know how much HA is moving thee days towards standardisation and best practices, but that is necessary when the system is growing and covering wider areas.
One only needs to read the source code to figure this out.
Not to mention, Jinja, YAML etc, which was new to me, spite my IT background, upon that the constant stream of new features, integrations etc.
I would answer the Topic Header very frankly
I’t as usable as you want it to be, and as reliable as you make it !
Oh, they are moving more and more to standardization and best practices and have been for years now. That naturally comes with being the biggest open source project on the planet. I mean, if you look at things they’ve done with Nabu Casa and even the code base itself, the rigidity of both accepting PRs and testing, it’s come a LONG way from where it started.
you have to be persistent, willing to spend some time and making errors.
But that must not be this way. Especially on some relatively basic stuff.
And I am lucky I have IT knowledge, not like other users trying/wanting to use it.
C’mon!
It’s FREE software that is appreciated by MANY people and has AFAIK capabilities that are endless.
Even though a lot of effort is being done to make it more user friendly and to standardize things, it’s not realistic to expect more.
Maybe you have to question yourself instead of the product?
I would advice you to use your time to investigate why something doesn’t work for you, set your frustration aside, try again tomorrow, ask for help* - which you will get here.
*do I have to tell you what the right and the wrong ways are?
I’t as usable as you want it to be, and as reliable as you make it !
How frequently are you making backups?
I’ve learned that best is to make a backup before every change I make, before every update I do - if I do not want spend lots of time after that in doing investigations.
It does everything that I need it to do, if it doesn’t I most likely I don’t need it to. They update with new components and improvements monthly, as far as the UI, they just added a lot of new features and custom cards that will allow me to do just about anything that I can think of.
Help is almost always available to anyone that tries to help themselves instead of looking for someone to do it for them. Both here on this forum and on ESPHome Discord. I have been down the road of buying equipment and software only to have the creators change methods or design leaving only the option of throwing stuff away and starting over.
It does not get said enough, but thanks to people who develop Home Assistant and ESPHome.
Maybe you have to question yourself instead of the product?
Yes, it’s probably me being an idiot not being able to find where the dashboard disappeared after I took ownership of it (as I wanted to change it), why the editable UI fields do not look editable and are greyed out, why HA looses authenticated user session on page reload, why zigbee coordinator tries to send a message to stateless device and fails, why integrations got messed up after latest update and so on…
Thank god (actually devs) there is abackup and restore functionally.
n them.
