I have a self hosted HA deployment that hasn’t been updated in a while. I haven’t updated it partially because they made the boneheaded move of deprecating their YAML config in favor of GUI-only config, and partially because the developers are insufferable dickholes.
I should probably move off of the deployment that I’ve got right now at some point, but what are people currently using for home automation? Is anyone running a newer version of HA that thinks it’s not actually that bad?
I set up a new HA install a couple months ago and didn’t write any YAML. It was kind of nice? The UI tools have come a long way and it discovered all my devices which had never happened before.
The thread you shared is worrying though, it’s the complete opposite of the spirit of FOSS. I should probably reconsider paying for their subscription at a minimum.
Absence of Yaml is exactly biggest annoyance in modern HA. It just not configurable without million of clicks. Just try to apply same automation procedure to other set of devices. In text you just copy block, in GUI you have to redo everything from scratch.
Personally, I haven’t run into a situation where I could only configure something via UI. There’s always been an option to toggle between a UI editor, and just a text editor for the appropriate YAML. There could be exceptions that I haven’t encountered, but they’re definitely few and far between.
i guess the issue is not that you can’t use yaml but instead that a lot of things are removed from the actual config.yaml file. inuser tonhave all integrations set up in that file, after every update i get a notification, that this is deprecated for that integration and that i should remove it and use the gui setup instead. i have my config in git which saved me from needing backups, because all was already configured and could be redeployed at any time to another machine. now that is not possible anymore.
Is the config not being in YAML really such a huge issue? The heart of HA, the automations, can still be written in YAML and have just gotten more powerful since then by adding blueprints and even Python support via AppDaemon.
and partially because the developers are insufferable dickholes.
That is one developer, HA is one of the biggest projects on GitHub.
As far as alternatives go I used openHAB before but HA is simply the biggest player in the ecosystem, standing even above many proprietary solutions.
Hey, I like YAML config just as much as the next guy, but I understand the decision to go the GUI way.
With large Home Assistant installs YAML gets really messy, and most changes require a reboot to show up (well, both issues could be fixed by the devs, but they chose otherwise). I really thought that I’d miss YAML, but so far it’s working just fine for me. Migration or restoring is a bit more tricky, as I prefer the start from scratch approach instead of the restore a 10 year old backup one.
Home Assistant’s (docker install) backup is just a zip file of the config folder. This makes it easier to fix things if needed, but isn’t as nice as editing YAML directly. I’d love to have option to use YAML if I want to and GUI otherwise.
As for developers being a bunch of assholes? Well, you’re right. Luckily the community is much better and much more helpful.
I believe your characterization of the developers is unfair. This appears to be an isolated incident by a single developer, and to take that and paint a picture of the entire team as dickholes isn’t right. I’m not even sure judging this individual by his worst day is fair, but that is up to you.
