same here, almost 2 years using HA, never skipped an update and maybe once or twice something did break, nothing major and easy fix.
I do automatic backups every night just in case, never had to use it tho.
but you don’t have to update if everything is working fine.
Now hang on…
I know I complain about the number of updates, but I do them as they arrive and it takes 5-10 seconds. Can’t remember ever having anything break.
If you’re basing your comments on what you see in the forum, then of course people seem to be complaining. They come here when something goes wrong.
A large group of them just want to find out how to do something. They get a solution (often three or four of them) and go away again.
Another large group are their own worst enemies. They buy cheap Chinese devices without researching them, try to install them without reading the docs and think to themselves “Great idea for an automation, I’ll just add that real quick”… then wonder why nothing works.
Then there’s the third (thankfully small) group who complain about Home Assistant because it isn’t something else. They’re very noisy, and they often make a point of mentioning their xx years of experience in IT. (The record so far is 60 - he must have started with punched cards. It is always “he” - funny that.)
HA can be frustrating because it’s a construction kit. With most software packages you think “OK, it does that…” With HA you think “OK, maybe I can make it do that…” And sometimes you can’t - it is what it is.
The number of people on the forum is only a small proportion of the number of people using HA. The rest seem to manage perfectly well without us. 
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On my Pi 2, where I test the beta’s, 15 minutes is about correct. On my production system on Proxmox, never more then a minute. It all depends on what system you are running HA.
As a matter of interest, how do you manage a test system like that? Is it a mirror of the production system and you shut down one when you’re running the other?
Both run concurrently. 90% of my hardware is integrated through mqtt, so no problem accessing it from more then one system. And mosquitto and Zigbee2MQTT run bare-metal in another VM.
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I 
agree. The average person is not motivated to post a review or reach out on a forum like this until there is a perceived negative interaction.
Unfortunately these days I feel folks are more prone to post their bad experiences simply looking for some level of moral support.
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Our recent Z2M thread interactions convinced me to go a very similar route. I’m very happy with the outcome so far!
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In the case of esphome updates I have to agree with OP, Just last week I had to restore esphome previous version and re-flash all esp devices. Took me almost 2 hours and I’m running on a nuc so compiling goes reasonably fast.
For me the updates (on esphome) come too fast too many. I would welcome something like separate update ‘subscriptions’ where you can go with latest and greatest, or opt for a more relaxed quarterly schedule. I don’t want to sound ungrateful I do appreciate the work being put in. I love esphome and what I can do with it, but updates need work imho
That’s for the esphome updates, I can’t say I had any issues with the rest of HA and I’ve been running it what? 5+ years I think…
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I only update my ESPHome devices if I get a repair message in HA (like some time ago for the Bluetooth proxies). Else I don’t touch them. If it works, leave it alone.
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Although carefully reading every release post (especially about the breaking changes) I simply skip at least every x.0, x.1 and x.2 version while reading here what other users tell. Never ran into serious problems this way. The latest (major version) is not necessarily the greatest according to my personal experiences with HA.
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You can essentially set up your own UI - dashboards (I have dashboards that tell me motion going on, that show all the sensor battery status in one place, that show me what is unavailable or offline (if anything)… which you then can use on your phone - fully customizeable - so I guess the UI you designed is no good (JK lol), or can you enumerate?
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No idea what you are going on about. I’ve NEVER had an update even take as long as 15 min. They all take 1-3 min for me. :shrug: Maybe I just use beefier hardware.
Maybe I’ve been lucky for the past 3 years, or maybe I sue fewer integrations that break. Don’t know. But the update process has been very quick for me, and has “broken” something I can’t live with until the next update like 2 times in 3 years.
I have been using home assistant for almost 8 years, just remember home assistant is an open source code IT’S FREE, it’s not for a normal person, we are a community that help in everything we can, giving an opinion or helping changing the code, yeah sometimes an update can change or break something and it’s good because all of us help to improve it,
Most of the integration are not made by the home assistant developer team, but by US if a modification is really good or very used the HA DEV add it as integration or add-on,
if you don’t like the aspects of an Open Source code, you can stick with your Iphone, alexa, smarthings and stop complaining about a better software that is getting better and better with every update
Running HA now for more than 4 years, and true, in the beginning, I encountered plenty breaking changes, most of these where because:
- Tend to make a poor choice of devices (needing custom integrations which development was slow or already abandoned)
- Tend to use a lot of custom love lace cards, which didn’t help either.
- Tend to have inexperienced automations, just needed to re-write/ streamline them.
- And ofc, the system wasn’t that far as is is nowadays
Once I normalized my devices, cards and fine tuned my automations, i never had difficulties updating. As someone else mentioned, the last ‘major’ changes was on zigbee2mqtt a couple of months ago.
However, these “legacy actions” are still supported on zigbee2mqtt (it just needs to be enabled), i changed all of my involved automations just a week ago before I turned it off.
True it took me some time, but there was no need to rush, everything was working normal.
In other words, you just need to learn how to male it stable…and that takes time.
Also this forum will help whenever they can.
From the looks of it, you didn’t ask a lot of questions:
This is the first time Warzel has posted — let’s welcome them to our community
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I rarely update HAOS and Core, usually twice a year. Home Assistant updates don’t cause me any major problems, I’m just a “if it works, don’t fix it” type. I estimate the chance of problems occurring after the update at 5%. Normally this is nothing serious, but I remember that upgrading from OS 9.5 to 10.X last year, made my system unstable (repeating kernel bug check); I’m currently on HAOS 11.5, which is again stable.
I also manage anohter HA box, in a remote location. It belongs to my brother-in-law. It’s on HAOS 9.5/Core 2023.10.X, very stable and fine. The only thing I update there is Cloudflare addon
Is it? I’ve never noticed that. Home Assistant just seems to work and the only time I touch it is to add or tweak an automation. Of course maybe that’s because I run Core and update when I feel like it.
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This is the way and optimal home automation architecture. The various network controllers are abstracted from the event/management engine. I have the Zwave and zigbee sticks running on separate RPi, and HASS and HomeSeer running in separate VMs (on a clustered Proxmox platform). Both systems can simultaneous talk/listen to the various controllers. It allows me to slowly transition off HomeSeer (ie, recreate events/automations on HASS) with almost zero downtime. The whole setup is nearly bullet-proof except for the controllers being a single point of failure, but that can be solved by having spare USB sticks and doing regular NVM backups.
Interesting that we see extremes on both sides. I find myself somewhere near the middle on most of the issues here.
I do monthly updates. Usually around the third week of the month, when point updates have settled down. Meanwhile, I’m on here daily, monitoring for changes which might impact me. I keep a list, so I’m ready for the update. The updates usually go pretty quickly, although my procedure, which includes backups, pre-update checks and post-update testing takes quite a bit more than 15 minutes. IF everything goes well. Much, much more if you count all the time reading and researching here.
@aceindy made an important point which bears repeating: KISS! It’s tempting to try out all the cool new bells & whistles you can add to HA. To endlessly customize the UI, install lots of add-ons, integrations and third-party components, jump onto every new feature that’s announced. There’s just so much you can do with HA that it’s hard to limit yourself to those things you’re got the time and motivation to maintain going forward. A realistic requirements document is always of value in any IT project.
I think the current update strategy is the best that can be done in a dynamic environment like home automation. There are lots of changes. Many seem pointless to me. Others are critical. But all of them probably have value to someone. And if you get too far behind, and especially if you don’t stay informed about the changes which can impact you, you’ll regret it when you have to deal with them all at once.
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Exactly, There is no need to have it do everything it could do; it should just do what it is supposed to do; turn on and off the lights and some other small stuff…and it should do it consistently and reliable