[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.