Openhab is a joke

Setup, Configuration and Use Beginners
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… not the post for you: simply ignore and enjoy your day :smiley:
Or I could say it’s like people voting for Trump; like flat-earthers it boggles my mind :smiley:

… spot on :slight_smile:

… a very nice statement…
However, sometimes it is better to cut your losses.

I find this thread interesting, as much as it is useless. :slight_smile:

I glanced over the OP due to being void of punctuation and capitalisation… which points to dyslexia as a possible cause, which manifests itself in an inability to do the seemingly simple: learning to read and spell, organising writing, taking notes, remembering instructions, telling the time or finding their way around.

This would then explain the experience of the OP, and maybe HA is easier to grasp.
That “Openhab (sic) is a joke” statement simply indicates to me that the OP abdicated his responsibility by blaming something else (here OH).

Looking at it from this angle, there is nothing of value I could add for the OP.

While I like the “lock the thread” I am sure that others like to express themselves. :slight_smile:

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May I ask what type/brand distribution cabinet you’ve got?

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image862×1054 263 KB

[edit 1] I read a bit further and found the link https://www.eibmarkt.com/de/products/Striebel-John-Leerschrank-AP-1400-mm-4-5A.html

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… a very nice statement…
However, sometimes it is better to cut your losses.

I find this thread interesting, as much as it is useless. :slight_smile:

The problem with these kinds of threads is when people keep sustaining them in an effort to have the last word over the OP…who is already long gone. I know that’s not your intention, @Max_G, but the heading is the very definition of clickbait. So as long as this keeps rising to the top of the “Recent posts” list, it’ll keep getting people riled up. There is more than enough negativity going around in the world, so I tried to head it off with my earlier posts, as did @hafniumzinc and @Andrew_Rowe.

I’m going to do my part by turning off notifications and moving on. I’d encourage others to do the same.

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As a participant on the thread I feel like it should recuse myself from taking any sort of actions like locking it. Therefore if you think the thread really should be locked someone needs to flag it so it gets reported to the other mods.

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I think we should take this as a valuable feedback and perhaps try to make the first time experience with OH with some common use cases to be as seamless as possible, if not more so than HA. Hopefully OH3 will be able to do this. In short, it’s the “plug and play” ability - because when someone is new, everything seems daunting and it would be nice if things would just “magically work”. Also I think Home Assistant is more “copy paste” friendly to get things up and running without having to understand even the most basic concepts (Things, Items, etc).

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Only if we can get some more participation in helping review, edit, and add content to the getting started guide for OH 3. I see lots of complaints about how they are not good enough yet but no one seems to be doing more than that. Getting Started with OH3: rewriting the tutorial - 1. Introduction

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I would suggest going one step further than the guide and design the GUI / User interface itself to be as intuitive as possible, so that even without reading any guide, a newbie can navigate themselves into a working basic operation.

Note I have not seen / tried OH3 yet.

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32

This is going to sound harsh and I don’t mean it to. Do you really believe that any developer of a UI does not already have that as a goal? I know for a fact that Yannick and everyone else contributing to the UIs for OH 3 certainly do. But there is only so much complexity that can be hidden from the user before you have to eliminate functionality and capability.

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I love OpenHAB and would love to see a wider adoption of it, so please don’t take what I said as a criticism. It is merely a (perhaps naive) suggestion for improvement, especially since I haven’t had a look at OH3 yet. From what I’ve briefly seen and read here and there, it does seem like there have been huge improvements on the UI and I’m looking forward to trying it out when I’m ready.

Of course I understand that. However, the goal may not necessarily, nor should it be to cater to complete newbies, and I understand that doing so is very difficult whilst still supporting all the complex features and capabilities of OH.

I don’t know if it’s applicable, but perhaps we could have a “simple” and and “advanced” mode, if that isn’t already available? We “IT” people are accustomed to a lot of the jargons and concepts which make many things seem obvious to us, but to others it may not be so.

It is clear that there are cases like the OP where they tried OH and gave up because they couldn’t get past that first hurdle, many of which we don’t even hear about because they wouldn’t even say anything and just move on. So we should be thankful that the OP took the time to voice his frustrations. Yes, he should’ve asked for help much earlier but not everyone would do that. Hence I said we take it as feedback, that’s all.

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I am very satisfied with Openhab.
I am using it (Version 1 & 2) since 4 years
I just recommend to use it

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35

Thank you.
I do know people generally mean well, but it’s a hobbyist area, sometimes you can experience someone taking things too seriously, get passionate about things and lose their temper.

As for the OP, well, some people just don’t realize they’re not on Yelp reviewing a Wendy’s because they gave them bad service, rather being invited to a dinner party by some folks who like cooking for others - and if they deem appropriate to clink their glass afterwards begging for attention and proceed to disparage their hosts while still being hosted by them, well, let’s hope they’re not doing it IRL, because that tells more about their quality as a guest than anything.

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36

I share the pain of the OP!
My first few weeks with openHAB were very frustrating. The concept of things, items, rules, binding, etc. is not intuitive for me. The documentation is sparce and cryptic.
But once I got over that “openhab-is-a-joke” phase, and things started to work as expected, it all started to make sense.
What I think I like most about openHAB is the robustness! It just runs and does its job. Very solid.
Thanks to everyone that has contributed. Keep up the great work.
But if you can improve that out-of-the-box experience, there would be fewer frustrated Newbies!

Ray

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37

I like really OH and i use the stable versions since many years with 100+ z-wave items. The first time with OH was very difficult, but the Forum and Discord helped me a lot.
The problematic part is for me for example the inconsistence of the parts. We have more UIs and we have the possibility to define things programmatically. But the information from this sources are not on the same place. If i define something in the UI and i define in file they should be in the same place, but its not so.
But if u can live with this small problems, than the OH is a very powerful thing.

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It’s convoluted but not really inconsistent albeit I agree it’s hard to understand.
Many users don’t read the docs carefully enough.

BTW OH3 will be a major improvement, it’ll reduce the number of GUIs.
The file/UI mechanisms will remain though.

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That means if i make something in the UI, that would be stored in different files? For example really cool would be, for example if i define an item, that this would be seen in the .item file.

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All in JSONDB. No write back to .items etc

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i stopped reading after “a
z wave zigbee dongle” (which are two completely independent technologies) and then noticed you mentioning home assistant…

honestly… smart home is only as smart as the person configuring it.

let that sink in.

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Let me blow your mind:

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43

My OH experience in a few words:

Winter 2018:
I started with a small configuration on my notebook to get in touch with it, it took me half an hour to install and see the paper ui for the first time. After some playing around and creating example items and sitemaps I decided to setup a real system.

I installed openhabian on a raspberry pi 3 and configured everything I got at this time. It worked out well for one year.

Winter 2019:
After some changes in my electric cabinet (several Siemens LOGO modules) I had much more opportunities like window blinds, lights, motion detectors, energy meter, watering…
I used a new raspberry 4 and installed all my software to control my devices and openhab via docker image. It took some time again to learn about the differences to the installed version but then it was running a year. My software provides a REST interface that is configured in openhab to be able to control the devices.

Winter 2020:
I changed the LOGO module from REST to MQTT to be able to have a notification when values change in the PLC. In the vacation I will create a configuration for OH to use MQTT, but there are still some things to learn.
This is a work in progress, there is more to come…

Conclusion:
Whenever you want to try something new there is stuff you have to try out, learn, understand, adapt. I’m using OH for some Features I don’t want to provide by myself (like UI, mobile phone app, persistence) and it just solves my Problems.
I struggle with some things and still have questions (how to backup configuration done in paper ui?) but I’m pretty sure that there is no system that perfectly good my needs, because Home automation is a field with many different combinations of hardware.
My requirements are

  • no vendor lock in (I could have used Siemens web ui)
  • flexibility and support for evolution
  • active development
  • modularity (just half with stuff you really need)
  • stability (I really don’t want to care for it during summer)
  • easy learning curve

OH did satisfy this needs more or less. Whenever I had problems I got help in the forum. People are friendly and really try to help (Thanks to everybody making this great project real).

I just wonder why you can’t get a system up and running within three weeks. Maybe you need a solution that is even more easy to start with. But I wonder why you say “openhab is a joke”. In my opinion it’s not. This is software how it should be.

Good luck with whatever solution you will use in future. I hope you will not write such replies when the system works different from your expectations.

Best regards,
Tom

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HI Paul
Sorry you have not had a good run with Openhab and i would like to wish you all the best,
i have come from lmce and moved over to openhab 4 years ago i have to say its been absolutely fantastic !!! i have an rpi3 thats run rock solid apart from the odd power out, its running a dmx controller and alexa a squeeze server and also lifx lights
I WOULD JUST LIKE TO THANK EVERYONE THATS BEEN INVOLVED WITH THIS PROJECT AND WISH THEM A MERRY XMASS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR
Regards steve

1 Like