Why is it wanted for the documentation to be incomplete?

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The Home Assistant Supervised installation instructions tells you to install network-manager if you want to “be able to control your host network setup over the UI”, so it’s a direct dependency.

Installing it, automatically causes the MAC address to change on every reboot, so it’s an issue indirectly caused by Home Assistant.

I wasted some days searching for the cause of the issue, because I didn’t know that network-manager caused it, and because the instructions didn’t bother telling us about it.

Following the boy scout rule, I decided to improve the instructions myself, to make them better (and more complete) than they were, and to prevent other people wasting the time that I did.

So I created this pull request, which was turned down without meaningful reasons.

For example, one of the reasons was that the warning that I added on that page is “part of my system”. But I’d argue that sudo systemctl disable ModemManager is part of my system too, as systemctl is not provided by Home Assistant. So that reason is completely wrong.

So, what is the harm of helping people?

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This was the warning that I added.

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First off, I understand your anger and frustration as I followed your first thread. Sometimes it takes time to get a system like HA running the way one wants it, and sometimes the learning curve is step.

So in theory I do understand why you would want additional information in the documentation. But as you were told in the PR by @frenck,

While I get the addition, we think this is really out of scope for our project.

We offer basic installation instructions on how to run Home Assistant Supervised, but the management of the host system, is something we consider to be out of scope for our documentation.

and after your response

sorry to hear that and sorry to hear you don’t agree.
We have discussed this with the team, and decided this is part of your system. If you run your own operating system, these are things that we assume you would be capable of. We are not planning on providing full tutorials on system administration for custom setups.

If you want a worry-free setup, please use the Home Assistant Operating System.

The thing is, if you try to see this objective, you must admit that your note will not fit to all users of this installation method. In most cases it is simply not necessary, as usually the changing MAC is not a concern. You have to think from the standard setup, not from your setup. And it is your part of the job, to control and check software you install, like network-manager.

These instructions shall provide a simple and standardized method of installing HomeAssistant. If, like in your case, some other things are necessary, it is in the scope of configuring the OS. It has nothing to do with HomeAssistant. systemctl is something different, as it is already standard in most Linux distributions (so one should note)

If you run HomeAssistant with an underlying OS, where some software could be installed or not, it is your part, to check these things, not the part of HA. If you want the care-free package, you have to go with HassOS, then the MAC is managed by HA.

If you’d ask me, a warning is way to much, I’d add another line to the note already there, like so:

Without the NetworkManager, you will be not able to control your host network setup over the UI. The modemmanager package will interfere with any Z-Wave or Zigbee stick and should be removed or disabled. Failure to do so will result in random failures of those integrations. For example, you can disable with sudo systemctl disable ModemManager and remove with sudo apt-get purge modemmanager

Without network-manager, you will be not able to control your host network setup over the UI. Refer to the documentation of network-manager for your OS to get more information.
The modemmanager package will interfere with any Z-Wave or Zigbee stick and should be removed or disabled. Failure to do so will result in random failures of those integrations. For example, you can disable with sudo systemctl disable ModemManager and remove with sudo apt-get purge modemmanager

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I see. So the harm would be that, with this, maybe others would want to add more solutions for their own subjective issues, right?

This is actually new to me. Would you be kind enough to explain it better? How could one connect a device or connect directly via SSH to a device that doesn’t have a fixed MAC address?

But then, connecting an external drive to it doesn’t work. Which is another thing I don’t understand, but I wouldn’t argue against it either, as I don’t know the details.

For convenience:

Without network-manager, you will be not able to control your host network setup over the UI.
+ Refer to the documentation of network-manager for your OS to get more information.
The modemmanager package will interfere with any Z-Wave or Zigbee stick and should be
removed or disabled. Failure to do so will result in random failures of those integrations. For
example, you can disable with sudo systemctl disable ModemManager and remove with
sudo apt-get purge modemmanager

Now this is an answer! Thank you very much. I found it quite rude for the thread on GitHub to be locked without receiving the answers to my questions, knowing I genuinely just wanted to help, not troll or waste time for no reason.

Something like “I’m sorry, but I don’t really have time to explain it better, so I’ll just lock this thread” would have been waaaay better, as I know how hard is it to maintain a project. But that was really like “I am right, you are wrong, so I’ll lock it so I can have the last word”.