I have HA running for years (in Docker) and it’s very reliable.
It has integrations with allmost all devices or apps I use and the support for DSMR (Smart Electrical Meters) is first class
I plugged a cable into my meter, the usb end into the server and it just works.
It does have a steep learning curve, though. It really seems “by IT people for IT people”
0ld · 1h ago
It used to have a steep learning curve, I’d say. Once I’ve had a long complicated manually written configuration of all my devices, integrations, automations etc, which gradually got replaced by simple clicking in the gui. On the other hand, this also meant a lot of breaking changes over the years, when I had to re-configure my staff the new way
tails4e · 2h ago
I have it in docker a d use supervised mode (which seems discouraged, but I want my machine for other uses also). The one thing I struggle with is updating, I'm concerned if I update it'll break. Is there a way to fully snapshot a container state and it's disk state, so I can 100% restore to it if something goes wrong ? I'm still running HA from 2020 because of this.
The other think I'm not a huge fan of is it's template language, it's clunky to say the least, but overall it's a great amd flexible system
acidburnNSA · 12m ago
In the last few releases they've polished the built in backup and restore features, which are available in the setting menu now.
I’m running it with docker compose for the same reason and it never failed an update, but there was an occasional config tweak required. For the most part it’s compose pull, compose up, check back in a couple weeks for the point release.
Updating from that far is probably risky but you don’t need to backup everything, just the config directory. Automated backups to Google drive are worth the upgrade alone.
apexalpha · 1h ago
I just backup the folder (volume) and that’s it.
If I should ever need to rollback I can change the Docker image tag from ‘latest’ to a specific one I guess.
I’ve never had to do it but I do know people sometimes complain about updates breaking things.
Havoc · 1h ago
The real magic is in my opinion in ESPHome. The fact that you can amateur solder some aliexpress $2 sensors together and have that actually work in HA with no coding except some yaml that you found on the internet is wild.
>It would be interesting to see what would happen to a pull request adding support for, say, OpenThings Cloud as an alternative. The fate of that request would say a lot about how open the project really is.
I kinda hope nobody tries. Their attempts at monetization have been pretty friendly and tame thus far & if something spooks them that could change.
oakesm9 · 31m ago
> I kinda hope nobody tries. Their attempts at monetization have been pretty friendly and tame thus far & if something spooks them that could change.
To be fair to them they've been making a big push on adding backup support recently. Their Nabu Casa subscription has built in support for this and was a major selling point for me getting the subscription (I have Wireguard for remote access already).
At the same time they implemented first class support for their own subscription, they added the hooks for other integrations to provide the same level of backup support. Now you can easily choose to use Google Drive, S3, BackBlaze and others just as easily as Nabu Casa. In some ways it's "better" as Nabu Casa only supports a single latest backup.
From this they seem pretty friendly and not too interested in lock-in.
bjackman · 18m ago
Yeah ESPHome is magic. I set up a full home humidity monitoring setup for the cost of a soldering setup + approximately $0 on components. No subscription bullshit, no proprietary interface bullshit, just exactly the setup I want and it was fun and easy to build!
rurban · 4h ago
I tried to install it on a raspi 4 with touchscreen for my wife. The raspi worked fine with Debian, esp. it's installer asks for the wifi and ssh keys, and therefore you can trivially connect to it.
Not so with the homeassistant installer. No wifi setup, no ssh access at all. You really need to cable it, nmap the new IP, and then I got stuck because the web server doesn't show up. Attaching the keyboard brought me into a restricted ha> prompt, where I cannot fix anything.
So far it's horrible
cyphax · 53m ago
If you type "login" at the ha> prompt, you'll get a root shell.
This is something I also had to accept about HA. It runs in a VM in my case so it worked out-of-the-box, but you don't just ssh to it after installing it, and the ha> prompt is just a bit different. So far, it hasn't been in the way, although it occasionally takes time to find out how to do things.
It's very flexible though, and apart from devices in your house there are many outside sources of data to use, like weather data, sun elevation or trash pickup dates. The HA app on your phone gives you many sensors usable in a flow.
The time spent on it usually results in something worthy of that time, in my experience.
SparkyMcUnicorn · 4h ago
I did this a few months ago for a test home assistant setup and had the opposite experience. I forget exactly what I did, but it involved editing a file with the wifi settings and dropping my public ssh key on the SD card before installation.
If you use ethernet, no editing required. Web interface goes into setup mode automatically.
Worth noting that ha cli[0] (ha>) does have a `network` command to configure this as well.
Mind that you should not use a Pi with SD card for HA. I'm not sure what the official stance is, but: In my peer group failing SD cards were responsible for a vast majority of issues. Causes are probably a mixture of heavy logging and power outages; either from the grid, or user error not shutting down the Pi before disconnecting power.
At our house I run HAOS in a VM (on a beefy server). My wife uses the app on her phone (as do I), and we have a cheap tablet with the app for guests. On the laptops/desktops we also have access to the web UI.
As the article points out, remote access for the phones can be done via the commercial offering or a VPN (as in our case: wireguard on the OpnSense).
xnzakg · 1h ago
Completely anecdotal experience but I've been running HA on a Pi from SD for quite a few years now with no issues.
baq · 1h ago
Wholly depends on how much stuff you’ve got. I’ve started having issues with the Linux io scheduler when the auto backups got large (1G+), the thing just hung and needed a power cycle.
raffraffraff · 57m ago
Anecdotal agree, but I only use it for my lights (about 20 smart bulbs + 5 sensors + 4 remotes) and I never tinker with it. At least 4 years later, that little Raspberry Pi 3 + ZigBee dongle + sdcard are kinda forgotten about.
I’d suggest that you use a docker instance. The setup is trivial.
Not having HAAS has made little difference to me being able to do all sorts of stuff - and HACS gives you access to a whole bunch of additional stuff, and works in docker.
shermantanktop · 4h ago
+1. I know the parent reads like “do it my way” but ha in docker really is simpler.
Just wondering why anyone would go through the hassle of installing home assistant on Linux when the fantastic hassOS exists which will run perfectly virtualized.
darkwater · 1m ago
What about the ones running it in Kubernetes? ^^;;
edejong · 4h ago
Because we want to run more than just Home Assistant on the same OS?
Because traditionally OS and application layers were separated?
Because we trust mature Linux distros more when it comes to LTS and security patches?
Because we already know our way around Debian/Ubuntu/Nix/etc.?
SparkyMcUnicorn · 4h ago
Proxmox adds very little overhead. I'm running dozens of things alongside HAOS.
The OS is the path of least resistance and gives you the best experience for low maintenance.
I'm also running dozens of things alongside HA and I don't have to use proxmox.
It's not hard to run HA in unsupported mode. The only real difference is an annoying reminder that you're unsupported. Everything else works, including plugins/add-ons.
I've run HA a bunch of ways. It doesn't really matter all that much. Use HACS to fill any gaps.
theK · 4h ago
Absolutely this. Once you get into the game of running apps at home with certain quality assumptions you end up having to bolt on various things (VPN, DNS, log aggregation etc) that are better wrapped around the application instead of having them run within it. And having an AppOS typically just gets in the way of all that plus what edejong said that you already know how to do it on the typical production OSes and learning to do it for every AppOS is just cumbersome.
ramy_d · 4h ago
Seconded. My home server does many things, one of which is homeassistant.
goodpoint · 3h ago
> we trust mature Linux distros more when it comes to LTS and security patches
This. If I have to trust some huge container or custom OS where is the benefit of open source?
pbasista · 3h ago
> fantastic hassOS
That is a very subjective opinion.
As was already mentioned, people rarely want to run a dedicated physical server for just a single purpose. The concept of Home Assistant Operating System requires exactly that.
Also, it is Debian-based. It uses the `apt` package manager which is slow. Some people may prefer something faster and more modern, like `pacman` or `dnf`.
> run perfectly virtualized
Fair enough.
But that obviously requires virtualization being set up on the server. If people do not use virtualization for anything else on their server, they may as well set up Home Assistant directly.
Finally, I think there is one more issue.
Many of the integrations which are possible with Home Assistant Operating System require physical hardware being connected to that server. A reader, a receiver, something like that.
But these home servers are often placed in some inaccessible locations, like an attic, where the data from sensors is unavailable. It may be impractical to run cables there. And the wireless devices may be too far away for a receiver located there to be able to read them.
So people need to come up with work-arounds to get their data to their server. They set up various signal proxies and thin clients which receive the data from the sensors on the spot where they are available and then send them over network to the Home Assistant server.
Unfortunately, from my experience, many integrations completely ignore this usecase. They are likely focusing on a happy path where everything is connected locally to "the one" server. And only then they behave nicely and work out of the box. But as soon as you need any special step or behavior, it is necessary to dig deeper and create custom layers to transport the data from your devices to the server.
Home Assistant Operating System does not make any of that simpler. Perhaps on the contrary, it forces you to use a specific Debian-based distribution with possibly outdated packages that you cannot easily upgrade without breaking Home Assistant.
Which is why it makes little sense to bother with it, in my opinion, for these kind of installations.
cyberpunk · 1h ago
> Also, it is Debian-based. It uses the `apt` package manager which is slow. Some people may prefer something faster and more modern, like `pacman` or `dnf`.
Do people really care if it takes 5 seconds to parse a package index vs 1? I don't get this argument at all.
Abishek_Muthian · 3h ago
For a long time I was running home automation using individual scripts and was happy with it. Then I found myself in a remote place where the ISP gave a shitty modem which hangs when there's no heavy usage ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I had to automate restarting the modem when the Internet is down by power cycling a smart plug[1], Home Assistant turned out to be extremely useful for that. Official HW integrations and Node-RED was very straightforward to solve my problem. Since then I'm managing and monitoring various hardware devices in my home through HA.
What's interesting is that there are manufacturers who are not only fine with HA but work with developers of HA integrations which enable offline usage of their IoT products even though their official apps are completely enshittified.
Nowadays I checkout HA compatibility before I buy a IoT device.
Home Assistant is a toy when it comes to automation reliability. It's a good toy though.
I'll stick to my domoticz for the "if it ain't broken..." approach.
O5vYtytb · 1h ago
I've never had HA itself fail. I've had it installed for 10 years and the only true failures were hardware (server, iot devices) or my own config mistakes.
Gud · 42m ago
I used HA for about a decade without so much as a hiccup.
What makes you think it’s a toy?
SparkyMcUnicorn · 4h ago
If you choose your hardware wisely, it's incredibly reliable. Most of my house is automated and I all I've done with it in the past year is add a few devices.
I will admit that low (or zero) maintenance is easier to accomplish if you know your way around a little bit.
It has integrations with allmost all devices or apps I use and the support for DSMR (Smart Electrical Meters) is first class
I plugged a cable into my meter, the usb end into the server and it just works.
It does have a steep learning curve, though. It really seems “by IT people for IT people”
The other think I'm not a huge fan of is it's template language, it's clunky to say the least, but overall it's a great amd flexible system
https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/backup/
Updating from that far is probably risky but you don’t need to backup everything, just the config directory. Automated backups to Google drive are worth the upgrade alone.
If I should ever need to rollback I can change the Docker image tag from ‘latest’ to a specific one I guess.
I’ve never had to do it but I do know people sometimes complain about updates breaking things.
>It would be interesting to see what would happen to a pull request adding support for, say, OpenThings Cloud as an alternative. The fate of that request would say a lot about how open the project really is.
I kinda hope nobody tries. Their attempts at monetization have been pretty friendly and tame thus far & if something spooks them that could change.
To be fair to them they've been making a big push on adding backup support recently. Their Nabu Casa subscription has built in support for this and was a major selling point for me getting the subscription (I have Wireguard for remote access already).
At the same time they implemented first class support for their own subscription, they added the hooks for other integrations to provide the same level of backup support. Now you can easily choose to use Google Drive, S3, BackBlaze and others just as easily as Nabu Casa. In some ways it's "better" as Nabu Casa only supports a single latest backup.
From this they seem pretty friendly and not too interested in lock-in.
Not so with the homeassistant installer. No wifi setup, no ssh access at all. You really need to cable it, nmap the new IP, and then I got stuck because the web server doesn't show up. Attaching the keyboard brought me into a restricted ha> prompt, where I cannot fix anything.
So far it's horrible
This is something I also had to accept about HA. It runs in a VM in my case so it worked out-of-the-box, but you don't just ssh to it after installing it, and the ha> prompt is just a bit different. So far, it hasn't been in the way, although it occasionally takes time to find out how to do things.
It's very flexible though, and apart from devices in your house there are many outside sources of data to use, like weather data, sun elevation or trash pickup dates. The HA app on your phone gives you many sensors usable in a flow. The time spent on it usually results in something worthy of that time, in my experience.
If you use ethernet, no editing required. Web interface goes into setup mode automatically.
Worth noting that ha cli[0] (ha>) does have a `network` command to configure this as well.
[0] https://github.com/home-assistant/cli
At our house I run HAOS in a VM (on a beefy server). My wife uses the app on her phone (as do I), and we have a cheap tablet with the app for guests. On the laptops/desktops we also have access to the web UI.
As the article points out, remote access for the phones can be done via the commercial offering or a VPN (as in our case: wireguard on the OpnSense).
Not having HAAS has made little difference to me being able to do all sorts of stuff - and HACS gives you access to a whole bunch of additional stuff, and works in docker.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44011381
The OS is the path of least resistance and gives you the best experience for low maintenance.
https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=hao...
It's not hard to run HA in unsupported mode. The only real difference is an annoying reminder that you're unsupported. Everything else works, including plugins/add-ons.
I've run HA a bunch of ways. It doesn't really matter all that much. Use HACS to fill any gaps.
This. If I have to trust some huge container or custom OS where is the benefit of open source?
That is a very subjective opinion.
As was already mentioned, people rarely want to run a dedicated physical server for just a single purpose. The concept of Home Assistant Operating System requires exactly that.
Also, it is Debian-based. It uses the `apt` package manager which is slow. Some people may prefer something faster and more modern, like `pacman` or `dnf`.
> run perfectly virtualized
Fair enough.
But that obviously requires virtualization being set up on the server. If people do not use virtualization for anything else on their server, they may as well set up Home Assistant directly.
Finally, I think there is one more issue.
Many of the integrations which are possible with Home Assistant Operating System require physical hardware being connected to that server. A reader, a receiver, something like that.
But these home servers are often placed in some inaccessible locations, like an attic, where the data from sensors is unavailable. It may be impractical to run cables there. And the wireless devices may be too far away for a receiver located there to be able to read them.
So people need to come up with work-arounds to get their data to their server. They set up various signal proxies and thin clients which receive the data from the sensors on the spot where they are available and then send them over network to the Home Assistant server.
Unfortunately, from my experience, many integrations completely ignore this usecase. They are likely focusing on a happy path where everything is connected locally to "the one" server. And only then they behave nicely and work out of the box. But as soon as you need any special step or behavior, it is necessary to dig deeper and create custom layers to transport the data from your devices to the server.
Home Assistant Operating System does not make any of that simpler. Perhaps on the contrary, it forces you to use a specific Debian-based distribution with possibly outdated packages that you cannot easily upgrade without breaking Home Assistant.
Which is why it makes little sense to bother with it, in my opinion, for these kind of installations.
Do people really care if it takes 5 seconds to parse a package index vs 1? I don't get this argument at all.
I had to automate restarting the modem when the Internet is down by power cycling a smart plug[1], Home Assistant turned out to be extremely useful for that. Official HW integrations and Node-RED was very straightforward to solve my problem. Since then I'm managing and monitoring various hardware devices in my home through HA.
What's interesting is that there are manufacturers who are not only fine with HA but work with developers of HA integrations which enable offline usage of their IoT products even though their official apps are completely enshittified.
Nowadays I checkout HA compatibility before I buy a IoT device.
[1] https://abishekmuthian.com/restart-modem-automatically-when-...
https://lwn.net/Articles/828428/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1019619/
I'll stick to my domoticz for the "if it ain't broken..." approach.
What makes you think it’s a toy?
I will admit that low (or zero) maintenance is easier to accomplish if you know your way around a little bit.