What happened to the Paper UI?

Hi, what happened to the Paper UI? I know support was dropped so I guess my question would be why this is the case. I’m not an OH expert, I have only installed it once about 18months ago. Now, I am reinstalling it and I find having a hard time without the Paper UI.
In my previous installation I preferred the Paper UI over the other interfaces.

Although its not supported anymore, is there any way to get this still going? Is there an old docker image version that I could use that still has the Paper UI?

It is not possible to use PaperUI within openHAB 3.x. We now have the MainUI as administrative and user interface. You can also use HABpanel and/or BasicUI.

Reinstalling Openhab 2.x gives you Paper UI
Installing Openhab 3.x gives you Main UI

I don’t know if 2.x is still available anywhere. but it will not be developed further

But openhab 3.x is the future and for me so much better than 2.x in 2021

I recoment Openhab 3.x with the Main UI successor to Paper UI

It takes some getting used to and for some it is easier than others.

I hope this explanation helps and ask Openhab questions in this forum if you can’t figure it out

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The only thing I can add beyond the previous responses is that anything that PaperUI could do MainUI can do too. MainUI can also do a lot of things that PaperUI cannot, and it does a lot of things better than PaperUI.

But because it does so much more than PaperUI there are more options and ins some areas more complexity.

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Thanks for all your replies. As my question indicates, I find it an unfortunate choice to drop the support for the paper ui as I believe it was easier to use, but there will probably be good reasons why this was the logical choice.

When the company that wrote PaperUI basically pulled their support for the Eclipse Smarthome Project, there was no one left who had the knowledge and skills to read, understand, and maintain the UI. Development on PaperUI basically ended there. It used outdated JavaScript libraries and frameworks and none of the remaining developers were willing to learn those just to keep PaperUI going.

But, if we assume that PaperUI were kept, it basically would have become MainUI in a lot of respects because PaperUI was never finished. It was always planned to become the one-stop UI for administration and user interface for OH. Once you add all the missing features, and fix all the stuff that PaperUI only half implemented or implemented in such a bad way as to be unusable (e.g. rules), you’d end up with a UI every bit as complex as MainUI only it would be built on deprecated and no longer supported libraries and frameworks and would need to eventually be rewritten anyway.

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