I am/was a newbie 7 months ago when I started with HA (which in turn I had to learn basic linux, basic python, yaml and all that stuff). I work with children not with computers. However I do not think this forum is condescending towards newbies. I always got proper help and as some of you might have seen I have set up a really comprehensive lovelace setup. All of that with the amazing help of this community. Though I have to admit that I am the kind of person that only asks for help if I really can’t find it any other way.
But tbh this community is one of the most friendly communities I have seen in a long time.
I second that, and imho it’s not only towards newbies - I presume that some members just think (or act as) they are clever/know more/whatever else and therefore have the right to say to that person something that isn’t necessary offending, but meant to underline/emphasise in some form that difference.
I know it’s difficult to withstand the seduction by fame as it’s part of our human nature.
I by no means say the way the OP decided to ‘leave’ HA is the right one or something nor I fully support his reasoning/any form of profanity/trolling.
I fully understand how hard it is to contribute to a project like this and get sometimes blame instead of praise and I personally try to keep it as calm and polite as possible when dealing with HA issues.
On the other hand, all volunteers should be aware of this side of things and nobody forced them to join in and carry on in spite of various negative issues related to the process here.
So it’s their choice, they should know about that and they are most likely happy with such a trade-off I presume.
That’s true. It’s all about the balance between how much effort it takes to get help and the level of frustration from unpleasant responses not necessarily caused by that person.
It IS a great project and it is possible to keep it evolving, and constant adjustments are part of it. It’s very naive to think that ALL the HA dev do IS right, they MUST adhere to their users and lack of a proper mechanism of doing that (which I witnessed personally) is a serious roadblock. After all, it’s HA for users, not users for HA, and if they are not happy about it, it’ll eventually die, simple enough.
Complicated it is. But any one-sided judgement without taking into account nature of projects like this and complexity of devs-users interaction carries a real risk of failure.
I don’t want this project to fail, so hope some lessons will be learnt.
I have to say that as someone with very little technical know how I have found this community as well as the Reddit and discord communities for HA to be very helpful (although I do find myself getting frustrated on the discord chat more than any). But this is definitely a beta experience you have to be willing to look for answers. People will help you, but no one is going to hold your hand. You have to be willing to break things so you can figure out how to fix them.
Ok, let me stop everyone here, I didn’t mean to Troll the site, and you guys are right, it was a rant. I was super frustrated and at a breaking point.
For the record I am not a nube. I have been using home assistant for probably around a year now. I haven’t joined or posted anything as I have been able to figure most everything out for myself. I think my first download was 0.57. I am able to work through most of this because I am a systems engineering in aerospace and have written level A software for aircraft. Not bragging, just saying.
I guess I was frustrated because someone said stick with stable releases, I have seen no way to determine what this is, there are only major and minor releases? This is just a suggestion for the community, but you should differentiate between stable and beta releases. The release I mentioned was downloaded as part of the hassio instructions download right from the hassio website. I had no intention of updating, but had to due to a power surge issue (I know my bone head move for not surge protection this). So I figured maybe clean stuff up a bit and start from scratch with the latest and greatest. Also, odd thing is I restored from a full backup that was fully working, but the restore did not work (can’t quite figure that out).
Anyway sorry I ranted, I usually don’t do such things, but as I said was so frustrated I couldn’t see straight anymore. Whomever said that you guys shouldn’t respond to me was right on the money.
The answer to that is unknown. Every version has it’s own flavor of ‘issues’. I find, if you have a version that works with everything you have, that should be considered stable. For me, the current version is stable. But I’m seeing tons of issues with node red and other things on the forums. I don’t use those, so to me, this version is stable.
Anyways, if you wan’t to save yourself some headaches, you can downgrade through CLI to the version that was working for you before.
To me that answer is covered in the rigger of the per-release testing. for beta release, usually the release group is controlled in size and the systems that are tested are reported to the developers, usually to ensure that beta candidates have the the ability to use the new functionality or fixes under test. And those participating in the beta are notified that this is a potentially unstable release and could result in loss of system or functionality, so many people who participate in beta testing do so on backup systems and so forth.
I was able to update my Hass.io to a beta only when I manually joined the Beta channel so I was well aware of the consequences.
Have no idea why you are talking about betas…
Speaking about “stable” versions, at some point I started to read release notes (especially paying attention to breaking changes) and blog to see if there are many unhappy users fighting with a new version. And I always make a backup of my SD card. That makes the whole process pretty safe and manageable.
Read the posts above about sticking to a “stable” release, many of these releases to me do not conform to what I would consider “stable”. As a note, I always do read the release notes for the package prior to install. Also as I mentioned in my post, I did not wish to upgrade to a new version, I did as a result of a power surge issue.
got it. well, yes, some of HA releases were a huge disaster… but again, read notes and make a backup. or stick to a version that you happy with. it’s your choice, really…
and you can install whatever release you want, not necessary the latest one
Actually that is a good point and didn’t think about it at the time, is there an instruction set for unzipping them into a flashable (ie ISO image or something similar) format for putting on a microdrive?
I only know that you can add --version=pref_version when issuing hassio ha update and you’ll get exactly that.
I think it simply downloads the image from a known server and then uses it as it’s a docker image or something.
Try searching/asking in the forum/discord, believe you are not the first and only one who wanted to know that
Do, you happen to know if you can go backwards with this, for example download the latest and specify a version to downgrade to. I had found the site that contains all the hassio releases in .zip, didn’t download and unload maybe they are .iso images inside the zip.
Really, ok now I am shocked, with the amount of releases and their frequency, I would have assumed their was a very active community of many even dozens of people.
there’s 2 full time developers who develop and manage and hundreds of people pushing changes. Home assistant is in dire need of help when it comes to testing and code reviews.
