A farewell gents, its been great

[Dom-Torro (Domino Torronto)]

I’ve been an avid user of OH since the early days of V2, and although like all things growing/expanding there were some rough rollercoasters here and there (mostly learning curve about what not to do to prevent nightmare scenarios), the platform has served me well.

With the recent advent of new integrations and the great flexibility of the smartphone apps in Home-Assistant, I just couldn’t resist to give it a go… I was highly impressed at how little memory footprint it had and the fact that I could actually do everything I did in OH, just a ‘different concept’ in as far as configuration is concerned, dare I say it, a lot less clicking and jumping around.

Frigate the person-detection system works like a dream, I get picture notifications via the smartphone app and the overall functional use of the smartphone app is very logical, even got two thumbs up from the missis (mainly the icon breadcrumb toolbar along the top, very logical for her).

Also thought I’d give some of my old zwave bits another go, and I was pleasantly surprised at zwavejs2mqtt integration, works great. Though to be fair, the OH zwave implementation was never a problem, always worked well, just the integration of MQTT is something that comes in greatly useful as I use MQTT heavily for my NodeRED stuff. It is my central information exchange for all things ‘smart’.

So I thought, let’s do more here, and I began migrating switches, rules, scripts etc… after 4 hours, I was done. The HA community is huge, a load of development going on, and doesn’t seem like it is going to slow down anytime soon. I found searching the forum very easy, quickly finding examples for how this or that works (setting up services, customizing default icons, Google Assistant integration using own Google account talking with own server and no middle man etc)…

I then went ahead and installed the HA smartphone app on our tablet monitors around the house, and now its live… to be honest, HA is every bit as powerful as OH, it has indeed come along a long way, and considering its development language is highly popular plus the foundation devs seem to have a very positive ‘nothing is impossible’ vision > no surprise the community has grown so well.

Sadly, my OH service is now shutdown, with this I wish all you gents a momentary farewell… well, who knows what the future holds.

[rpwong (Russ)]

Good luck with it, @Dom-Torro! I’m a firm believer that this isn’t a competition, and I just like to see people find the solution that works best for them.

[Dom-Torro (Domino Torronto)]

Competition? never saw it that way, never said anything of the sort. However can’t ignore the fact the developer and community base in HA is pretty big, and of that ‘big’ number I would say young millenials who want/need all the latest conveniences.

To be frank, OH platform does things very methodically and does via the UI provide a great deal more configurability, thus, during the migration, I kept swearing, I filled the dirty tongue jar rather quickly. When you realise that OH does ‘many’ things ‘better’, but then you quickly start to overlook that when you realise how easy it is to manipulate HA, and therein is the attraction…

Just to give you an example, one of the components was missing a particular device_class, I looked at the python code, dropped it in, boom, done. Yes I am a coder, but not python, childs-play though, it is purely the rather modular simplistic design of HA that just pulls you in, no matter what level of coding genius your background may be. OH on the other hand requires a serious primer if you want to start changing things, and this I feel is what limits/holds-back newcomers from jumping in. Even seen it here in posts, some devs have come along, get negative backlash from the old-crowd here, and those devs never return… more than likely went straight to HA, pretty warm atmosphere over there to be frank. It is a compound of issues to be fair, jumping ship is not an easy decision, we’re talking not just a new learning-curve but also a completely different ethos, thankfully the community in HA is rather positive.

The real seller for me is just the modern integrations and the fact that theres a great deal more on the horizon, they even recently hired a fulltime UI designer, so this is going to hopefully bring even more benefits to the community.

If I didn’t require the latest integrations with projects like Frigate, or the extra flexibility of the smartphone apps, I probably would never have even given HA a second thought. My last experience with it was years ago, and it was a royal mess back then… things can change immensely indeed, time.

[rpwong (Russ)]

@Dom-Torro

Competition? never saw it that way, never said anything of the sort.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that you did. I see now that my comment could have been read that way, as I deleted some text that I didn’t feel was necessary (turns out I was wrong).