WTH are integrations and addons in two separate places?

Are you asking me? :slight_smile:

I asked both of you.

Bonus points if you can also provide an answer for installing NUT.

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Seeing just this list I wouldn’t know what to install no matter if they are in one or two places. But seeing all of them in one list at least tells me what I have to educate myself about, if i wanted to find out. As I said: Tags and explanations could help here.

Ideally there should be one single button saying e.g. “Frigate” and clicking it would educate me what it is and guide me through the install process by e.g. asking me “do you want to install frigate as a stand-alone network application or do you want it accessible from within Home Assistant?” just like e.g. a Windows Installer will ask you wether it should install e.g. a missing framework that is needed to run the GUI of a software within Windows.

From a user perspective whether Frigate is a integration, add-on or whatever the heck doesn’t matter - you just want Frigate to work.

And NUT: Bonus points indeed, if anyone could finally tell me how to get this working. I’ve been trying for months by now! Just having a single install that in the process scans the network and offers you what UPS’s it finds would be great. But instead you get an add-on and a integration that both need cryptic manual configuration!

Some HA developers and stakeholders seem to be, sorry for the expression, a bit narrow-minded. This might be because they tend to focus mostly on the technical side of things and have a rather conservative approach to the user interface, often lacking an understanding of basic UI/UX concepts.

What I’m trying to say is that for an average non-techie user, there’s no need to understand the difference between ‘integrations’ and ‘add-ons,’ just because one runs in the same address space as HA and the other runs in a separate container.

But if the target audience is techies, I’d understand why things are the way they are.

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Very well put. If this mindset doesn’t change HA will never live up to its potential of being the gold-standard of home automation.

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That’s the thing, you are thinking from the perspective of just home assistant. Here’s some facts about frigate (And many of these integrations).

  1. Frigate requires MQTT Broker, MQTT Integration and Frigate integration, and Frigate Addon. That’s 4 things in the list that are needed. All with configurations. I accidentally omitted the frigate integration.

  2. The only 2 things that are required for installation on the home assistant machine are the Frigate integration and the MQTT integration (both are technically optional, one or the other). The other 2 required softwares can be ran on separate servers. There’s no way HA will know what your intentions are.

Lastly, we currently do this with Zwave. All you need to do is install the zwave integration and it will automatically install addon based on a wizard. Guess what happens right now? People do not read the wizard. There are hundreds of posts on these forums because poeple just blindly check options (that have descriptions) without reading the descriptions. They end up getting into a support situation where things are messed up. The point I’m making, we tried this and it does not work well. Just wander over to the zwave section and look at all the posts where the zstick isn’t communicating, a large majority of these posts are because users double installed things because they did not follow the wizard and read the prompts.

Yes there is. Please understand that only 2 installation method has addons. The other 2 installation methods do not. Making a curated list with both will not work for these other installation methods because addons literally do not exist in that context.

So not only has this failed in practice (with zwave), combining the lists and wizards will be an development/upkeep heavy process. All for something that in will not help the situation.

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UPS’s don’t connect to NUT over the network (some do, but it requires a NIC card on your UPS) and the NUT software is what would be finding your UPS.

If you have the NUT software running on your network, HA already automatically discovers it.

What stands out to me with your comments is that you currently lack the understanding that the NUT software needs to be running on your network. The addon just adds the software to into HAOS. HA will discover it regardless if it’s coming from the addon or if it’s coming from an external computer on your network.

Id say it proves my point: Any average user is lacking this knowledge. And an average user doensn’t want to have to understand anything about what NUT is and where it has to run. You just want to plug your UPS’s USB cable into you machine and have its entities show up in HA. End of story.

When building software the design process always has to start from the average users perspective, never from the dev side. That’s why product owners exist.

We do not control NUT. You understand that right? It’s a separate software that HA cannot automate.

These guys write NUT https://networkupstools.org/.

Not only that, but the addon is custom. Meaning we have even less control over how it behaves.

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I personally understand that fully. But the average non-techie user does not.

Mind you I have worked as a Product Owner and understand how frustrating it is to dumb down software / UI / UX to make it work for all the non-techies out there. But the non-techies pose 99% of the potential user base and excluding them by design just makes sure that a product will NEVER EVER suceed commercially.

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There is an important distinction - if an add-on doesn’t work, HA is not (in most cases) responsible for fixing it. If an integration doesn’t work, it is.

Conflating the two would likely lead to frequent bug reports that are not HA’s responsibility. If the user is not techy, I would say it is even more important they understand that they are separate applications and to not blame the HA devs if something goes wrong with an addon.

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But this is still just another purely behind-the-scenes technical reason that’s unrelated to UX. Where can I point my mother to read about why and how this is important to understand?

And once again, is the target audience for HA non-techie regular home users or not?

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But they will need to, regardless if it’s in the same list or not. Which is the point I’m making. Couple that with the fact that it’s custom, a wizard will not work because it’s not a standard part of HA. Same with frigate.

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It’s in getting started:

Is this what I should be showing my mother?

And once again, is HA actually meant for non-techie, regular home users or not? Just making sure!

The getting started page, yes, not just the graph :wink:

Also note, the underlined words are links to pages that describe each item in the graph.

EDIT: As for the getting started page, I believe it needs a bit more work

All of this to say, “combining the lists” really does not remove any complexity. It just adds the same confusion in a different area.

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Haha, okay. That says it all! You’ve really made my day! :wink:

I have no idea why. The points made here for combining the lists do not solve any problems, they just move the problem.

:man_shrugging:

Your mother is VERY VERY much not the target of HA right now and won’t be for AT least 5 years.

You’re assuming they’re targeting the general public right now and that doesn’t have to be the measure of commercially successful. It’s not zero sum.

Home automation at large simply isn’t that sophisticated yet. (cough Mattercough)

Also your mother won’t be installing frigate. She’ll be installing a few zigbee bulbs a yellow what’s built in and the single point of entry if they take defaults would get her there. If she does need frigate she will know how to do it

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Yeah, unfortunately, there seems to be a lack of self-awareness on the matter, especially if Nabu Casa actually intends to make HA available to a wider audience beyond just non-techies.

For any real change to happen, the management team needs to step up and stop focusing solely on adding new, exciting features. As a company, they should also take responsibility for the more mundane tasks, like maintaining and improving existing solutions, such as UI/UX.