Why is Home Assistant so crappy lately

Maybe I was a little mad when I started the post and I over reacted - not afraid to admit it. I DO appreciate the work of all the people involved (I myself fixed a bug for Edimax switches regarding authentication and I am currently listed as a contributor, even if a very small one - https://github.com/home-assistant/core/pull/12873).

I also appreciate the community. My post was aimed to see what other problems people have, and if they feel like me what was their decision. But like the moderator said, you cannot just say I am a troll because I have different opinion, but I guess some people are just like that.

So I will end discussion on this topic now in a friendly matter. I wish you all a nice day and health (seems to be more important these days).

7 Likes

We have completely different opinions on this, I have only been using this now for about 4-5 months and I think itā€™s brilliant and only getting better. I run mine from a VMware esxi simply because I have other always on things running. Home Assistant hasnā€™t fallen over yet without me changing things and not knowing what I was doing.
But in 4 months thatā€™s happened twice. All my lights, power and devices run from it, again without any issues. Maybe have a look at the devices youā€™re running. The one thing I did was select what I wanted to run and what protocols would run them. So for example all our lights run from a deconz usb ZigBee device attached to the VM, we have Amazon echo running in every room and a tablet running in the kitchen to control the alarm and every device in the house, I understand that it can get frustrating when things go wrong, but thatā€™s when you turn to Google or reading the forums, asking questions here. I havenā€™t come across an issue that someone hasnā€™t already faced. After two years it makes no sense you giving up now.

2 Likes

Hey there! I got here while looking for support with this one, and I appreciate the bigger conversation but - what about we address what was reported, resolve it, and move on :slight_smile:?
@Andrei_Pop surely wants to see fixes after 2 years using HA happily!

So, letā€™s talk smart things - shall we? @andrewsayre what has changed to cause a new behavior as per above/below? Can we support in revising it? Can we do anything differently to avoid the loss of sync?

The experience changed from ā€œwe are loosing API sync if we force close HA and we are unluckyā€ to ā€œwe are loosing API sync even on a clean HA rebootā€. Having been tracking the # of API keys generated on SmartThings with versions (properly nerd style), after this little something was changed, that moved from v9 in almost 2 years to v25 in less than a week. This means you had to re-configure it once every two months, right when playing with configurations or new bits, and now you need to do it once a day for unclear reasons. Surely not the experience the team aimed to.

Thanks to the community - you are amazing.

[edit]
Iā€™ve raised an issue on GitHub, as per community guidelines we might want to move the specific conversation there. Please @Andrei_Pop or anyone else having the issue if youā€™d add anything useful to it let me know, happy to add to the summary. SmartThings ST - unexpected loss of refresh token validity Ā· Issue #33282 Ā· home-assistant/core Ā· GitHub

2 Likes

Hey! Thanks for the comment. I will update your bug report when it happens again, right now for me it is working again, I will see for how long.

Thanks to the community - you are amazing.

+1 on this!

1 Like

my 2cents here,
usually upgrading HA is a lot of pain because of breaking changes, i stepped over this multiple times, that is why my installation is ancientā€¦
I basically need to rebuild my whole setup from the ground up (I think iā€™m still on 0.79) but my experience is rock solid it just works from a pine64 with selected integrations (namely hue and xiaomi and I started long ago an unfinished integration of samsung AC) and the community is great.

Iā€™ve been running for 2 years and like all weā€™ve had a few bumps, but the guys and girls here have bent over backwards to help.

Ever since I set my system on an i5 with 8 gig ram, and 250gig ssd, loaded everything in a virtual environment, it has been flawless, simply flawless. There are breaking changes, but before you upgrade know the changes you need to make, and address them immediately.

Simple. Frustration and Spouting off does no one any goodā€¦ remember this is FREE?

@Andrei_Pop I apologise for calling you a troll. I was just trying to stop another endless thread where someone posts in haste and there is parade of rather pointless ā€œits greatā€ posts. ā€œDonā€™t feed the trollā€ is pretty much shorthand for that thought. Nothing personal, although I can see how it looked otherwise.

I am glad the posts have turned a corner to actually address some of your problems.

4 Likes

@Andrei_Pop you must learn, learn and learn.
Please close this thread, the first post is useless.

Iā€™ve been using Home Assistant for Ā± 6 months and most of the problems that I faced were PEBCAC.

This forum is a great asset to support a free application so maybe you should change your approachā€¦ or find an alternative solution.

1 Like

I concurā€¦
Had a lot of issues on the rPI, moved it to Hyper-V and everything works flawlessly.

1 Like

I have HA for two years now.
In the past i wrote a similar message, a complain on lack of testing.
Iā€™m an it business manager and deal with every part of SDLC every day but im not a developer.

Thinking on what i wrote in the past and what @Andrei_Pop wrote, for some reason Ha still is something not easy for everyone. You have to spend hours to learn and try, i did it with patience and now everything works flawlessly.
I apologize and thank the community for the support given.

@Andrei_Pop donā€™t give up and improveā€¦

5 Likes

We all get stuck at times. When that happens I start a new thread for a specific issue and people fall over themselves to help me and I get a solution. That is how this project works. A non specific goodbye-cruel-world type rant will always result in pretty much what you see in this thread.

4 Likes

Nothing is perfect but HA performs as close-to-perfect as Iā€™d expect.

1 Like

giphy

6 Likes

At some point, I guess that a stable 1.0 version will be neededā€¦ We could stick to it for a longer period of time than the current period release!

Me too! Probably those who can not use Hassio, or do not want to waste too much time or are not as good as they think they are! 15 Lights, 30 sensors, Thermostat, TV, Broadlink, Ziggbee, Tv Box, Google Mini, Echo Dot, ESP, Wled and other little things ā€¦ very few problems with both the raspberry and the mini pc!

My biggest gripe would be that every addition to my system meant it did not work the first time. Only after extensive tinkering, hundreds of google searches and dozens of forum posts. Documentation is sometimes severely lacking, when asked development claims this is not a consumer grade product. Most of the forum posts remain unanswered. People asking the same question over and over again, as a forum doesnā€™t work that well as a wiki.
Donā€™t get me wrong, I want this product to work. But I also remember when I was fighting Kodi years back in the same manner, then discovered a fork called Plex. Switched in a heartbeat, never looked back. HA trust me: you have users and they do experience a product.

1 Like

Itā€™s a struggle, my friend. I fought with this software for maybe 2 years now. I have about 300 entities, 15 integrations, a metric ton of automations, and a highly customized front-end. Iā€™ve also done really extensive work in CSS, JS and Python to suit it to my needs in custom cards and components. Iā€™ve been through RPI3 and RPI4, Docker running on some crappy old computer (that should still run HA fine), and finally landed on my current home of it running Hassio on a Ubuntu VM on VMware. I have serious RF issues in and around my home that forced me to investigate and solve Zigbee issues that took forever to solve. It all works fine now. BUT, while automations in the house are cool, and I get a lot of neat data about my home, itā€™s truly a hobby. If you donā€™t enjoy fixing this stuff all the time, one of the more packaged solutions might just be better. Thereā€™s nothing wrong with that.

1 Like

This. Looking at HA as a kind of hobby project is most likely the best mindset until v1.0 milestone is reached. For me HA is a fun way to experiment with sensors, data and automate my home. Sure every now and then something breaks (e.g. zigbee sensor falls out of the network, not even HAā€™s fault there) but fixing it and figuring out why it broke is half the fun.

I see tons of people who are trying out HA and thatā€™s good, but when you see people posting contents of yaml files on the forum and they donā€™t even use the preformatted text tag, they probably donā€™t know much about the ins and outs of the system. Home Assistant aka Hass.io takes a lot of the manual labour away for a lot of people but itā€™s not at a level the non-hobbyist should invest all their time and money into it. What you get is a forum flooded with the same kind of questions over and over because a limitation in the GUI perhaps pushes the non-hobbyists/non-programmers to the yaml config files which is probably total mumbo jumbo to a lot of people.

That being said, I agree the documentation is sometimes lacking in the examples department. Also, why donā€™t we set up a wiki or FAQ section where all of the questions that get reposted a lot are stored, as well as the interesting ones? The problem I see there is the fact HA is not at v1.0 yet and maintaining all those questions (if they donā€™t become outdated) is a huge work for every (breaking) change that is introduced.

TL;DR; Home Assistant, until v1.0, is something for the hobbyists who enjoy spending hours of tinkering, tweaking, testing and figuring out stuff with the system. It is not (yet) for people who have no programming experience. Weā€™re getting there, but for now either go with the flow or wait until v1.0 comes around.

2 Likes

As I saw several times arguments that HA is expected to be unstable because itā€™s betaā€¦
Iā€™m really curious what you are taking the confidence from that v1 will be any different from current 0.xxx?
Is v1 number makes a software stable in some magic way?
Itā€™s only a number. current 0.107 could be easily 1.07, or 10.7 or whatever.
Also this project might never reach v1 by decision of makers. After ten years it can be 0.100007 still being called ā€œbetaā€ by pseudo-defenders.

Stability of software is not judged by version numbers. There might be unreliable release versions and stable betas. Itā€™s always only about quality of code and developers attitude. Nothing more or less.

1 Like