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HomeAssistant has changed officially supported installation methods so much, I personally don't know what's supported. Docker, tarball, installer, their own OS Part 1, etc were all different ways you can run it.

Last I checked, the bare metal pip3 method was "always" going to be supported. So the "Just use Docker" comments ignore this.

The author complains about a lack of product leadership at Phillips, but HA has always been renown for ignoring their users.




I put HAOS on an RPi4, plugged in a Zigbee/Z-Wave adapter, and never looked back. It runs 15ish Sengled RGB bulbs wonderfully, I've got all sorts of lights macro'd and timer'd (e.g. porch light comes on at sunset, turns off at midnight). Reliability is crazy, the UI is wonderful, I can access it from all sorts of devices and native apps...and there's a few other devices it sucks in too (air filter, Chromecasts, my NAS health, etc.) Now I haven't done any of the other actually useful projects I have in my backlog (thermostat, motion sensors, security cameras), but I'm extremely confident that HA can handle any that I throw at it.

All that being said, I find it a little odd that this article is somehow decrying HAOS as a worse alternative to a proprietary, anti-user black box developed by companies trying to squeeze more profit, just because they played fast-and-loose with some shell scripts at some point. (Aside: I just installed Homebrew on a new Mac today, and it's still just a curl | sh)

Most of the major consumer IoT vendors have had major security incidents (Wyze, Hue, Nest, Arlo, many others), and if nothing else, my little HAOS Rpi gets a little obscurity compared to the big names getting hit by script kiddies. Not to mention it's easy for me to keep it local-only and just join it to my Tailscale network.

But given all the allusions to HomeKit, I suspect the author has total faith in Apple to do it right (not a wholly misplaced assumption) and wants everything to just talk HomeKit.

Which we might actually get (in practice) as Matter makes inroads! Hell, I'd love for everything to talk HomeKit because HA can emulate a HomeKit Controller, and that means less cloud APIs. Win for everyone!


HAOS has been a pretty good experience when I set it up at my parents house though. I don't begrudge HA from trying to figure out the most reliable way to support installation methods - they're in a complicated space, and techies like us do tend to build unique-snowflake home setups.

I'm running the docker container (since I already had a home server running docker containers), but a NUC with HAOS for my folks has been working great.


I do begrudge them for putting in placeholders for features for years that weren't functional. Like a map that was blank and entire sections that weren't functional. I also begrudge them for doing things like removing Python 3.7 support 1.5 years before it was EOL. I begrudge them for re-architecting entire features like Open Z-Wave three times over the five years I used them. I begrudge them for asking their projects be removed from other open source projects.

HA is one guy's pet project to goof around with the latest and greatest technologies.




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