[wkat4242]

I like home assistant a lot but i do think they change too much for the sake of it. Every upgrade breaks someone something. Either some Yaml format has to be changed like from under platform to sensor, some integration I was using breaks, something I still need to use is being deprecated. Often for arbitrary reasons. I would prefer more focus on continuity. Especially the stuff that's already in there should just keep working.

The problem is this disruption makes me feel really disinclined to update but when leaving it multiple months it's harder to find out what breaks beside I have to go hunt for all the intermediate changelogs.

[eamonnsullivan]

I keep it up-to-date religiously and rarely run into breaking issues, but I have occasionally. I keep an eye on the release notes (https://rc.home-assistant.io/blog/categories/release-notes/), so I usually have at least a week's notice when a breaking change is coming and can adjust. I used the Met Office integration in some of my automations (setting a fan's speed based on the outside temp) and spotted that it was going to be disabled, and switched to Accuweather before this month's version came out.

[Ringz]

I have had the same experience. Only once in 3 (or 4?) years was my Zigbee dongle (Phoscon ConBee II) not recognized after an update.

I just had to restart, and everything worked again.

[distances]

I've been thinking about setting up HA, but I'm a very lazy home admin. It's likely that pretty soon I would fall to an update cycle of about once every second year.

Sounds like that would be a major pain though. Is there a pressing need to keep it up to date? Could it be treated as a set up and forget forever system, like I did with my NAS years ago?

[wkat4242]

You can yes, but the problem is: Once you buy some new device you're going to want to integrate it and that is when you start running into problems without upgrading.

But yes it will work forever in terms of it not being cloud-connected. Of course with the exception of integrated devices that don't have any local access.

But yeah it's a pain if you don't do it monthly because you have to manually go and find all the intermediate changelogs and read through them. Or you just pull the trigger and see what breaks and then google how to fix it. Which is what I tend to do.

[wkat4242]

Yeah but it's a lot of work to keep up with all this every month.

Especially if you leave it multiple months because the info will be scattered over different release notes.

[karlshea]

I hear this a lot but I'm guessing it comes from more of the power-user experience. I use it a decent amount but only have 2 yaml-based integrations set up, and I haven't really run into any upgrade issues, to the point where my Docker setup is auto-updated.

[wkat4242]

Yeah but this is one of my concerns. They're trying to make it a mass market product so they can make more money with it. And the interests of the initial supporters from the time where everything had to be configured in Yaml aren't covered as well.