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.

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.

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.

and partially because the developers are insufferable dickholes.

Is that guy an official developer? It looks like he's just a developer of one of the add-ons, but I haven't deeply researched this. Gross behaviour nevertheless and seems to stem from a misunderstanding of what a FOSS license means.

EDIT: I see what you mean in this thread: https://community.home-assistant.io/t/consider-to-avoid-adding-library-dependencies-from-frenck/315185/33, although that was a couple of years ago so maybe things have cooled off a bit.

I'm very happily running openhab!

Hmm, I don't think the dev being a dick here. He can ask distro maintainers to not package his app. There are plenty of devs with similar stance, e.g. jwz who asked debian to stop packaging his xscreensaver app. Likewise, the maintainer is free to ignore the dev's request and include the app anyway.

I used OpenHab a few years ago and remember it being way more fiddly with very varying integration quality. it didn't help that it was based on OSGi packages (the complex mess that Eclipse IDE is also based on), which I don't much care for.

i only recently starte with HA and found it much easier to use and tweak.

But I also saw some stubbornness by the devs. In my case related to oauth/third party authentication, which they claimed was "enterprise interests trying to corrupt a community project" (I'm paraphrasing) instead of good security practice of centralising the authentication in a homelab.

Try HomeSeer. I ran it for years before switching to HA.

I bit a bullet and re-implement all automation on NoderRed leaving HA only dashboard. It is still not great, as Node Red is gui based. So may be Pythom + MQTT is best way for home automation.

I understand both frustrations. I still run HA, and with a few addons, namely VSCode, ESPHome, and Node Red, it's a very serviceable solution, and I don't think anything else comes close. The config is still YAML for the most part, but you do have to go through a lot of GUI to get to edit the individual elements. That's for sure not as nice, but I wouldn't want to set up my complicated home theater automation on any other system.

I’m deep in the HA rabbit hole but I wonder how OpenHAB is travelling

I second openhab. Can't speak for too many integrations but all I tried work without issues.

Especially the separation of abstraction layers is something that I came to appreciate highly. You have the physical object, it's item representation and then the rules and interactions. On the downside might be the way that this abstraction makes the configuration a bit more complicated - but as you're missing the yaml config you might enjoy the configuration files! I'd just give it a shot :)

HA has a sour taste for me since their broken promise about open sourcing their server side. It's still a black box. Plus the whole dns debacle a while back. And I honestly don't understand how HA is still the de facto standard for home automation - I tried recreating some of my more complicated rules in HA and it became such a mess very quickly (think of 3 or 4 non nested conditions and altering the states of multiple objects depending on virtual items).

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 4 acronyms.

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