Moving from OH(this is no rant)

Funny, tell Microsoft, Cisco et al.
But you failed to answer my question so please do.

I DO think it is unstable and not user friendly. the “stable” 2.5.0 release was released as broken for new users who installed the addons package on Linux. The issue was opened ( not by me) around the Milestone 2 timeframe and ignored.

You cannot have a stable & functional system without attention to quality. Yes, I addressed this with Kai personally and it finally got fixed in 2.5.1 because of that. I see OH3 going down the same pathway.

So you think OH3 is unstable because there was an issue in 2.5M2 ? Or did you mean 3.0M2?
And you say it’s fixed. So why is OH3 unstable ?

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An issue raised in 2,5M2 that broke new Linux users was totally ignored until the users complained after stable release. I see similar things in OH3. I believe there are some issues running as a Windows service, for instance.

Since this is turning ion a rant I am ignoring this thread now. I know I cannot change your views on this.

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So software must not be released as “stable” as long as there’s known issues with it and OH3 is unstable today because about a year ago some issue in 2.5M2 was ignored ? And you are sure this is not just your personal view ?
I somewhat understand you feel annoyed by that but you need to do better than that to prove your claim.

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How many times has this been really accomplished in the last years? I for one are depressed by documentation which is intended for Milestones or breaking changes not good documented.

I am looking into moving to HA, since i don‘t want to refactor everything every few years (OH User since 0.x/7 years).

HA updates are seemless and major Updates every monthly (stable). This also means there is not as much spread from Dev to Stable.

For a project of this size and complexity with all volunteers, I’m pretty happy with how it has worked out. The 3.0 release took longer, of course, because the changes were far more significant.

That’s a fair criticism.

Sure, if that works better for you.

I’ve heard differing opinions on the stability of the HA releases, although I have no direct experience myself.

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After more than three deacades in the free software world and at same time as an IT professional I have to ask:

Is the grass greener on the other side?

Everyone must answer that question from their own perspective!

But,… I realy like to see the reasoning!

Complete and understandable or not.

For me OpenHAB is very stable, and scores top notch from my experience from both the comercial and free software world!

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I like seeing peoples reasoning as well that have tried both…

Here’s my opinion which I am sure some will not agree on:

Bottom line first is that they are different and I get the idea that HA is aiming to create a locked down appliance concept that works on very few hardware devices, but returns a greater experience for a noob at the expense of some users leaving. OH likes to be more flexible and cover all bases so they are headed in different directions. You also have Naba Casa charging a fee per month and this will be driving where they invest their time, they are a business and their clients are entry level users so it makes sense to cater for them and head in that direction, as you guarantee the income of your business model.

openHAB approaches things from a opt in VS HA’s approach to opt-out. OH you have to install the bindings and most of the time trigger a scan to find devices, with HA everything is installed and working away in the background so you have devices found when you first start and this helps to ease setup for new users. They don’t need to work out what binding to install for X device as they are all running by default. If there is a downside to the higher activity VS the streamlined approach that openHAB takes, I have not formed that opinion yet. Data is collected on you and sent back to Naba Casa devs unless you opt-out of it which I found funny from a platform that try’s to tout ‘privacy first’.

OH forum is more helpful, less posts go un-answered here, but if you had 5 times the noob posts on this forum, I am sure it would be the same pretty quickly.

OH bindings now 100% all of them support setup via the UI, last time I counted 10% of them did that in HA and the rest required YAML only setup with no UI or auto discovery support. OH is gaining new bindings at double the rate of HA at the moment which I found interesting. I guess when you pay people to code, you have less people that want to do work for free :wink: Textual config is supported auto matically in OH, but is not compulsory anymore in HA so their bindings perhaps will not bother implementing textual setup as it is more work. The consistency of the bindings now that V1 is removed is a big draw card to the OH platform.

Updates and breaking changes: OH holds off and dumps all changes in a lump ie V3 where a lot changed in a short space of time, where HA trickles probably more breaking changes in total but some in every release. I think not letting them bank up is a better idea as youtubers will not bother making videos if they know a new version of openHAB is coming out and their content is no longer useful. Hopefully some content creators start on V3 now it is out.

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I didn’t like HA.
Tried ioBroker and its running ~ a year now.
I’m not really a Node.js fan, but its stable.
And had a far more user friendly UI and concept of creating things and items and so on.

I left when OH 2 Hue Emulation changed so it could not be used by the Logitech Harmony Hub Remotes.
Might be a rare use case but is important for me.

Im pretty happy with ioBroker, imported my z-Wave network of 10 nodes just fine. (z-wave 2 adapter)
Now i have more things connected then with OH 2.
And 4 Updates went ok, not flawless. But the information what to do was easy to find.

I will try OH 3 at my parents house to have a look at the new UI.

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Huh? Now that’s a case of pretty wrong expectations then.
There is no documentation intended for milestones, only for releases.
And milestones aren’t releases. As a “pure” end user you are not expected or recommended to use them so when you do you must not expect all the things like stability and docs you might expect from a release.
Sure docs are never complete and in time let alone available when you would want them to be, but that’s because devs can only start writing them when they’re done with the code for the most part (and once you’re there your focus is on getting the code finalized. Bugs can prevent usage, lack of docs hardly does and can be compensated for in a number of ways).

And documentation is just as good as the contributions from non-devs (i.e. the user community) are.
You can only start writing useful docs such as a breaking changes document to also tell you about alternatives when a bunch of early adopters has been testing and using the code for quite a while.

And given there’s a breaking changes section and there has been a public joint (Wiki based) tutorial writing effort this time with OH3, I think we as a project of volunteers learned quite some and have pretty much improved on the documentation part.

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Well what i said is, i expected to have documentation only for stable releases, but there have been documentation changed to unstable releases documentation. It was an addon - but something bigger, i think 1wire but i am not sure. I mean this would be fine, if you could select the revision of the documentation (Version OH 2.x, OH 2.x MS1, … OH 3).

I tried last year (doesn’t talking about 2020 that way feel good, already?) to switch the last OH1 implementations to OH2 and stumbled on that again. Its mostly little things, but you can only figure it out with looking at the code or narrow the problem down with a lot of searches.

I understand it however, the really active users (mostly also new users try to get everything running) are moving to/running dev/milestone builds.

Anyways for a “stable” user who have their 500+ device things running for a long long time - who “just” want to install/integrate a new toy, this can be quite frustrating

I don’t get it, I fail to decrypt the meaning of that sentence. Please fix or rewrite it.
So you expect no docs for milestones but there been some (before release i.e. ahead of time) and that you dislike too ?

So you were on some stable release but upgraded to a milestone and now complain because noone told you in time there would be a breaking change ? Did I get that right ?

You want to have separate documentation versions including milestones ?

And all of that even though you expect (your words above) docs ONLY for releases ? Huh ? Now what.

I used an stable release of openhab 2. I looked at Introduction | openHAB to migrate an existing OH1 addon i used for 6 years+ to the OH2 addon (as Kai Kreuzer announced that OH1 addons will not be supported further in OH3).

The Documentation on Introduction | openHAB for that addon was not describing the active stable version, but a dev/milestone version and did not work with the stable release.

IMHO: If Dev/Milestone Documentation is allowed (which would be fine), then the documentation should be versioned as well (and selectable by the enduser).

So it was documenting the version to come? What’s wrong about that ?
There always is a version selection menu to access the docs for older version, so what.
And this is why you are “depressed” ?

You must not be making fun on depressive people. That’s a serious illness.

Feel free to add anything you feel is missing. As I wrote we need users to write the docs.
So are you going to contribute to the docs from today on ?

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Since i am feeling even better to disassembling Open Hab - no

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I hate threads like this. OH, HA and others are open source. They represent countless hours of volunteer development and support. I (we) are non-paying users of such effort and must be gratefull to such people.

Comparative analysis is welcome but I don’t think that it is the purpose of this forum.

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@mstormi
Here is an example. "Stable OH3 was release with known (since October) breakage for Z-Wave and other bindings.

Well all I understand from quickly browsing that is that some experts discuss a complicated matter with no simple obvious way out. I did not see a decision therein to break OH bindings (affected does not mean broken) and release it like that as you indicate. And AFAIK it isn’t broken. I’m happily using 3.0 ZWave myself. But I am no core programmer so cannot comment on the necessity and impact.

I don’t hate this thread or others. I only wonder about several posts.

At times, someone posts a rant. Someone in this case is a troll. And it will be feeded for sure! If the troll is good one, the thread might even be interessing: you may learn a lot about involved people.

This time someone (TO) gave some feedback about his motivation to move to HA. So far so good. Then “me too” starts and make other stepping in asking for more specific reasons. Most of the time this does not happen to really understand what the TO wants to tell us. It happens only to “prove”, that TO is not right. The “TO is right”, “No! TO is not right” chat starts. Unshure who’s the troll here. Might be more than one. Doesn’t matter. They will all be feeded well.

As this thread runs a month now and i think it will end up shortly: next thread already available :open_mouth: .

Well, at the end you may be right: psychology is also not the purpose of this forum. On the other hand: it’s social media, isn’t it?

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