See this example: https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/issues/10590#issuecomment-350068847
This makes it clear why stairs are more correct. But of course they are not beautiful and it would be nice if it could be configured. An option could be “discrete” vs. “analog”. Normally if you have floating point values, you do not want discrete stairs. Whereas if you have fixed values like “0”,“1”,“2” you may want to display them discrete.
Stairs are more correct in that particular case you link, but in others it may not. Using stairs for discrete values and linear for floating values may work well in most cases, but I’m sure it wouldn’t cover everything, and would require ugly things. For example, what if I have a humidity sensor that gives me integer values in the 0-100 range? Graphs would be staired since values are discrete, when linear should be a much better representation, so I would need to hack a template sensor or something that converts 57 to 57.0 in order to have a proper graph.
Since there doesn’t seem to be a perfect way of doing this detection automatically, I think a graph parameter is needed to manually select staired graphs or not.
What temperature sensor are you using?
If you use one that is more accuarate you get graphs like this:
what are you using?
Bosch BME280 - It does humidity and pressure also
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Wall powered temperature sensors may probably send values frequently enough as to avoid the stairs effect. But battery powered sensors tend to send data only when there’s a significant change, thus making stairs noticeable. At least my Xiaomi sensors work that way.
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Sorry to revive this topic but you may be interested in the workaround to plot with spline line style in this new topic post.
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And how to make linear line ?