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by alex3305 1111 days ago
I have been running Home Assistant for over 4 years (end of 2018) and and the beginning was rough. However since about a year and a half, a lot has done to improve stability. I can now safely update every time without breaking anything. The only integrations that break from time to time are custom integrations, which aren't supported anyway. But those have become rarer too. Automations and scripts have been stable for years now. And the release notes are also really, really good.

I would recommend to take another look at HA if you get the chance. Especially within a VM (or bare metal) it's a really good experience.
1 comments
florbo 1111 days ago
> Especially within a VM (or bare metal) it's a really good experience.

I've been using the Docker container for a couple years without incident. Like you, the only integrations that occasionally broke have been custom components.

While I agree that automations and scripts have been very stable, I've never really been a fan of the new automations and scripts UI, though, so I just stick to editing the YAML definitions manually. Great to have that option.

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alex3305 1111 days ago
> I've been using the Docker container for a couple years without incident.

Before I ran HA Supervised [1], but that was a pretty poor experience. It broke every so often because of some sudden software incompatibility because Supervisor was silently updated in the background. And it really broke everything instead of having a grace period and/or sending me a notification.

> I've never really been a fan of the new automations and scripts UI, though, so I just stick to editing the YAML definitions manually.

Same here. Although things seem to improve in the next version with copy-paste support in the Automation Editor [2]. I would love being able to edit my YAML automations though.

Did you also known about a little known feature that you can setup different automation sources? Just like this:

  automation: !include automations.yaml
  automation foo: !include_dir_merge_list automations/
  automation bar: !include_dir_merge_list automations2/
Although not _best practice_ per se, you can have both UI and YAML automations at the same time. This is especially useful when you want to use Blueprints [3].

1. https://www.home-assistant.io/installation/linux#install-hom...

2. https://rc.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/05/31/release-20236/#...

3. https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/automation/using_blueprin...

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