buy stuff that is common, that is mentioned in the components list, with document pages that you understand. dont use all the other stuff.
install the nabu casa app.
make the choice between easy and cheap. easy comes with a price. always!
Well yes - i’m not arguing with you on that at all. However if that is the mindset we could as well just ship all tech people to an island where the can collectively out-smart their phones and let the rest of the world get back to using smoke-signals 
In the end you can only create tools so smart that they improve the lives of even the dumbest among us - else the whole aspiration of the tech industry is futile.
without smart people around, the lives from the dumbest among us will never be any better.
so if you are not smart enough to setup HA, and you want it, find someone that is smart enough and pay him.
thats how the world works.
i guess the whole aspiration from the tech industry is futile then.
my wife now has more trouble turning on the TV then 50 years ago.
my sister never was able to turn on a tv.
the smartest options for “dumb” people are “dumb” appliances.
a wallswitch works perfectly for “dumb” persons. it people who think they are smart that want to make that wall switch smart and think that it makes a live easier.
if you are not smart enough to take away the need to use a wallswitch, then dont make it a smartswitch at all.
“if you are not smart enough to take away the need to use a wallswitch, then dont make it a smartswitch at all” very well said indeed, same goes for smartphones and smoke-signals. However i dont think i has anything to do with being smart - just because one is not educated / interested in programming does not make one dumb. I just don’t think i has to be quite as hard as it currently is with HA, that is all. If i take the people around me for comparison - most of them have a Masters degree or Phd from one of the best Technical Universities in europe and i don’t think many of them would have the nerve to build a complex HA setup as it currently is.
I dont feel like this whole discussion is going anywhere useful to be honest, the opinions about the matter are pretty much made it seems - so be it. Thank you all however for the many replies - this was very interesting! I’ll keep on exploring HA and all it has to offer and am very much looking forward to its development in the future. Unfortunately i cant really contribute on the coding. If there is a way to support the devs financially or otherwise i’d be happy to!
there are over a thousand of them, but i guess they all would like some 
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Haha - yeah i know that. Not quite in the position to go down that route unfortunately - i meant if there are any specific projects that need money, idk like for licences, fees or whatever - or also if there is any non coding-related work that could be done by a noob.
go read the docs.
what you dont understand, ask and learn about it.
then improve the docs
edit: but i hope you dont have a job, because the amount of work you could do there will take up all your time
…well whaddaya think why i can spend two days setting up HA
I’ll look at the docs, thank you for the input!
that you had a weekend without your girlfriend?
Another poor soul here - a programmer desperate to find any quality documentation. All I get is just half of the information as if everything was obvious and there was no need for the documentation as if those who are writing are utterly disgusted by writing documentation.
On top of that, it’s a system that can destroy itself by updating and there is no guide on how to fix it besides starting anew.
I would like to add my 2c.
HA is an open-source project run by people donating their free time. As with every project and this includes closed-source projects, not everything is perfect, far from it.
My take, there is no point complaining. You do not like something? Do something about it, improve it, ask to contribute, for your benefit and everyone else’s.
This, I think, should be the attitude we need to adopt if we want things to positively change. Do something, get involved! Be positive and create actions, instead of being passive and just an observer.
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Actually it is run by a commercial company, Nabu Casa, with around 30 paid employees. Most of the core development is by them.
That said, there still are a lot of volunteers contributing.
Constructive criticism and feedback (commonly referred to as VoC) is a very important part of software and product engineering. An echo chamber community of yes-sayers, where negative voices are swept under a rug (and that’s a pretty widespread issue in some BDFL-type open source projects) will stagnate and their product will get more and more disconnected from actual users. Ranting, no, but constructive negative feedback is just as valuable as positive feedback.
Hey Alex, I understand, however; constructive criticism is about feedback, how someone can improve, what is it you are missing, what you want done better, how can you assist moving the needle forward, etc.
Correct. The OP is a good example of how such feedback can look like for a semi-technical user. He voices confusion about understanding the basic concepts, naming schemes and finding information on how to proceed. The tone is polite and the OP explained that he did his due diligence in looking around on his own first. It’s not an angry rant. He’s not a developer. You won’t get PRs or precise code fixes from users. That’s fine, their feedback is just as valuable.
Now the OP was posted over 5 years ago now, so things have changed since. But others haven’t. There is still an issue around documentation and communication. Bridging the gap between normal users and developers (we often take things for granted that are absolutely not common knowledge).
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I think Home Assistant is a bit of a miracle. Getting all those contributors and users to move in more or less the same direction must be like herding cats. There is a related issue, though, which doesn’t often get mentioned: people become involved because they’re interested - if nobody’s interested in a problem (or worse, if they’ve lost interest) it doesn’t get dealt with. This explains many of the gaps and inconsistencies as well as the sprawling documentation… and there’s not a lot you can do about it.
In which case let’s figure out how we can fix all that. Let this thread start the ball rolling.
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Honestly, when talking about documentation, I think there is no way to fix this. This is a very common problem in open source. Writing user facing documentation is hard and not something people consider very fun. Also, the people who know the most about the software (devs and power users) are typically the least likely to write good user docs.
The only way to ‘fix’ this is by paying people to write the docs. And considering how often HA changes (for the better or the worse), this is a fulltime job.
On the contrary, you can do a lot about it. As with all open source projects, support in all forms is very welcome. So what can you do?
- report issues you are having to the forum and see, if somebody else experienced it. If necessary, say it really is a bug, report that issue on Github.
- support “external” developer (as in not-hired-by-NabuCasa) by contributing to their integrations or custom_component. Eg. if you can help with an issue on Github, the developer don’t need to take the time to answer, thus can do more work on the project itself. Documentation is another point for such projects - if you have an understanding how things work, help by writing something. This is specific to “external”.
- Support development by buying devices, you are willing to share in some kind. Either by developing yourself, using it and reporting back to a developer or even donate it to a developer, so he/she can use it to develop. Not every developer has the money to afford all the different devices, that are necessary for some projects.
- Be part of the community - spread the word and get involved. This forum here is proof, that non-monetary projects can have an outstanding support. It happens quite often, that you get an answer to your question within the hour… I can show you a lot of companies, that can’t give that level of support for paid products.
- Come up with ideas! Let’s say you’re unhappy how the documentation is written. Go ahead and open up a new thread and bring up ideas how to improve it. Discuss this with others. You don’t have to be the one, who is actually writing a new documentation, but if you have a system, that could work better, share the ideas so others can get involved.
In the end you’ll see, that there aren’t that many people involved in the real hard work (ie. coding), but the input, the ideas and all these things need to come from others. My speciality is a mix between support and writing, so I try to answer questions here in this forum (and on other platforms). That helps the developers as well, as they don’t need to worry about support (not only mine, but the hundreds of interested peoples support). They can focus on development.
And in the future this will maybe lead to other projects, more support or even something totally different. Maybe you learned something over time, and can now bring this knowledge into your own first component - who knows.
But in the end it always comes down to one thing: are you willing to invest time in a project, where you profit enormously, or not? 
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The main problem here is, that the documentation for such a big project is complicated and so only experienced users find what they are looking for. The documentation HA has, is good to very good in that sense, that every feature is described and explained, but finding these explanations is kind of impossible.
It is a long ongoing discussion, on how to improve the docs, but honestly, even people like me, who are job-wise obligated to write documentation, can’t come up with a better system like the one we have. This thing is so big, finding a way to reorganize it… You get where I’m going. Btw. if you have any ideas on how to improve it, be my guest. I’ll do a lot of writing if necessary. 
Just in case people have missed it. At the end of every help end-user docs page there is a way to provide feedback.
Also available for dev docs:
I understand if you want info fast what do you do. Provide feedback using the buttons above, while at the same time post a forum query which will hopefully be answered within a day.
The younger generation have not experienced the early 80s tech world. It used to take a couple of months to communicate and fix firmware coding issues.