The OOTB experience is fundamental for new users alike. Therefore outdated elements like the default theme, need a long overdue refresh.
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That’s not relevant cause it’s not an issue for the vast majority of HA users. And even if it were, replacing the default theme wouldn’t do much to fix it. It’s a custom compatibility issue.
This is about unifying the default visual experience to match HA’s own updates.
The mushroom integration into HA improved the lovelace part this year, and bunch of changes were made to the settings and integration page over the last 3 years.
But the rest of HA? The sidebar, the top bar and some other elements weren’t part of that visual overhaul. So yes, completely aside from the dispute whether the current default theme is “visually appealing” and “modern” enough, it’s reasonable to update the default theme to match these changes, so the default overall visual experience won’t be as fragmented and inconsistent.
Now that they’ve got Sections working well enough to become the default when creating a new dashboard, I have no doubt that the developers will work on making the rest of the interface look more modern, even though there are probably a lot of folks like me that aren’t enthusiastic about seeing Home Assistant starting to look like most every other Home Automation and Control application out there.
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The goal is to make everything simplified, clean/modern and easy to use for new onboarding users, which aligns with what other Smart Home automation systems do well with. At the same time giving experienced/advanced users the flexibility to customise/tinker to their liking (which is already possible).
Currently, HA looks and feels outdated and is quite overwhelming to use as a new user. However, the devs are making slow but steady progress to address this.
I consider myself a experienced user, and welcome this change. People need to understand that this is required for HA to succeed and appeal to the mass market.
Nothing is being taken away from you, so I don’t understand the disgruntlement.
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I do understand that the changes need to be made for the new user experience to improve. The disgruntlement come from there not being an obvious way to alter the UX to my liking. And that’s, to me, the crux of the issue; the new users appear to be saying “your preferences don’t make sense to us, so they don’t matter” when the best way for theost people to be happy with something is to provide options to change things you don’t like.
Aw yeah, winamp. IT REALLY WHIPS THE LLAMA’S ASS!
This gives me two ideas.
The first: it would be nice to have a picture associated to a specific device — the more info dialog for that device or entity could then show the picture of the device.
The second is that the morning for dialogue could list scripts that are related to the entity or device such that if I have, for example, a script that will vacuum only a specific room like the kitchen (hypothetically named “Vacuum kitchen”), it should show listed below the main controls as a button I can tap, called “Vacuum kitchen”.
Both would enormously facilitate the use of related stuff like scripts, and maximize the appeal. I really don’t need a giant switch in the more info dialog!