Technology

I have been using it for years and still find some things confusing. Like idk why it's so hard to figure out how to customize the dashboard and create new widgets for it. I've been a professional web dev for 8 years and if I'm struggling with it, you can bet most people aren't even going to bother. Idk what's so hard about providing simple html, css, and js like every other web framework.

I'm totally cool with that. Even as a more technically-minded user, I see a lot of things that could be way more streamlined.

You would need to make touching a config file non existent. They've improved this over time, but not quite there I imagine.

Yeah. I ran it in docker for years and it was such a hassle compared to HAOS. The switch to VM was best decision I made regarding HA.

Oh it's not as bad as your making it. My water sensors were only about $20 - $30 shipped and I mean if you're going to make an order you might as well get that $30 z wave extender so the fence gate sensors I spent $40 on have good coverage. I pair those with about $100 in temperature and humidity sensors for the attic, garage and freezers. I mean I needed to justify the SDR I picked up for like $45 you know. My $20 garage opener has also made life that much simpler. Wait how much have I spent already?

"Ease of setup in exchange..." I think people tend to forget what "ease" is for others. This is nothing against you as I agree with your statement but I work a job where doctors can't figure out how to even unplug a keyboard.

We tend to associate just being on a social media platform and typing on a computer with tech literacy. Not saying you did this just using it as an example. I think ease comes with more than just setup it comes with dealing or having patience with that setup.

We use Home Assistant in our house but I also have Google Assistant and even with Home Assistant I still find there are many more things to troubleshoot that Google Assistant just doesn't give me problems with.

For example it updated and our Camera just stopped being viewable outright and the time and money it actually took to fix that and yes I said money because it had to do with our camera hardware and upgrade on Internet service. So not directly Home Assistant but indirectly to fix it we had to buy another camera. Where Google Assistant just works.

I don't see anything wrong with the users statement either. All kinds of FOSS apps and services offer ease of use setup and platforms. I am not sure Why Home Assistant couldn't be set up to do some easy to add integration as well or offer competing products against things like Google Assistant aside from cost and not being a hardware company.

If the idea is to be inclusive the being easy as an exchange is a reasonable request from an end user. We also forget people don't have the hardware or time to learn to self host. Some of us have day to day jobs that don't involve this kind of understanding as well as kids, etc. Ease of use as an exchange is why many platforms the Lemmy community doesn't understand are so popular and maybe open source platforms should adopt that mentality somewhat to bring more people in.

You can live in both worlds and want the other world to give you something another world might. However, don't get me wrong I don't disagree with you. Home Assistant isn't terribly difficult to learn but if I were to hand it to my parents I would be doing it for them. There is also a laziness to be said that can be attributed to people not wanting to learn to set up something like this but I don't believe that to be the same as entitlement as a consumer is entitled to want more from a product.

Anyways, I have said my bit and this isn't meant to be an argument just providing my perspective. I would argue we should stop nagging people about "easy isn't a good trade off." Easy is why so many services people hate on Lemmy are so popular and there is nothing wrong with ease. We should encourage easy in products we want more people to be a part of and companies to engage with users to make those products easier because in the end it makes Doctors life easier and easier for me to recommend to someone with no experience in the world of open source and self hosting. It also brings competition to the table and awareness can spread if something is easier to use and recommend. I wouldn't recommend Home Assistant to my girl friend as an example because what she does for a living is type in excel spreadsheets and word docs but I wouldn't expect her to deal with home assistant and that is not against her because she is absolutely intelligent and does all sorts of things with numbers I can't even as someone in IT who should be able to do so. She absolutely and 100% could figure it out but why would she when her life doesn't pertain or really care about things as such because those things aren't as open as something like Echo's platforms and Google Assistant which makes setup and access easy to use?

I'd argue it's a bear and I still use it. YAML is just fucking awful and I'm glad they've been hiding it more and more over the years but it's still there. Zwave is still wildly confusing compared to something like a Hubitat which is just plug and play (guess who has to just rebuild his Zwave stuff from scratch). It's also insanely organized where add ons are different than integrations, and are hidden in different menus, as are system functions and just... It's a mess from UX POV. It's also a nightmare to try to interact with the codebase or documentation or even ask questions, much less make a suggestion. As an aside to address the point of the article, I have absolutely zero worry that they will ever forget about power users, because I, and many other power users who have interacted with Paulus on boards before agree he is kind of an asshole who absolutely does not understand why anyone would want to do anything different than how he imagines it - including documentation or UX or whatever. Home Assistant is totally safe for power users.

Now of course I'm not trying to say it's bad, just that it is kind of a bear even for the tech savvy. You can't beat HA for being able to interface with absolutely anything. There's almost always already an integration written. It can do anything, and if you're persistent enough you can kludge together a solution that works in exactly the way you need. You might even be able to hide all the kludge from your spouse. It's also all free, because Paulus and a hundred other devs contribute their time for free and they're amazing for it. Absolutely awesome for power users. But being simple or easy just isn't one of its many, many pros.

Some have tried working on this. Authentik even developed a hack to make it work with HomeAssistant. Unfortunately the core devs of HomeAssistant have historically viewed external auth as a niche feature that users don't care about.^[https://github.com/home-assistant/architecture/issues/832#issuecomment-1328052330] Not sure if that is still the case, but until that mentality changes we are stuck with native auth because PRs are just going to get denied.

I think this post pretty much sums it up:

In 2024, Home Assistant sticks out like a sore thumb among FOSS projects for its lack of modern authentication and authorization.