Which Home Assistant install is right for you?

Home Assistant Operating System (HA OS) or Home Assistant Container running on Docker? Which installation method is best for you?

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Edit: I edited some scenes out of this video after uploading to reduce some confusion around Virtualization and Home Assistant Container

[GetawayFilms]

You strike me as the type of guy that can hold a full conversation in assembly language.

[timderks]

Man, this is the video I could've really used when I was getting into HA. It's a great bit of software, but they really lack in explaining these basic things in an understandable way.

[mc.the_machine]

It really seems too bad that home assistant isn't designed in a way that it can be used reliably with add-ons within a broader operating system that can be set up to do other things. I got that there's some programming difficulties with putting it together like that, but it would seem far more efficient for a lot of users to be really able to have the full convenience of it on an efficiently run device. I think the closest one could do to this would be to virtualize the home assistant operating system, without a lot of hassle an issues. The thing about that though is that that presumably as much more resource intensive than if one could even do the equivalent of what HAOS does with dockers. It would be nice to just have proper packages that would work within a package manager, run natively, and resolve dependencies and such the way that the systems are designed to. I think Home Assistant would see far more used if it could be used that way, and that might be its biggest barrier to adoption. Having to dedicate a computer to it, by expensive hardware, or jump through a lot of hoops just makes it much harder to get going and simply experiment with things.

[oscargr_]

Not sure I understand it perfectly yet, but this IS the video I was looking for.
The home assistant documentation itself is rather vague about the differences.
I have watched other videos about the same topic but sometimes one person's words land while another's don't.
Thanks for the video.

[DNAblue]

The HomeAssistant website didnt make the distintion between addons and integrations very clear so I thought that the docker version would be terrible. Thank you for clarifying this.

[bobdinitto]

Although I don't have home automation I'm interested in it. So I'm glad to have found this channel where I can learn more.

[defnotKevin]

That intro was crazy, just 25 seconds of bro talking DIRECTLY to me lol

[Taipou]

Your videos are top-grade! 🏅 I like how you're explaining advanced topics in an understandable way. I hope that many people will take full control of their system because of your videos. The vendor lock-in products (e.g. Philips Hue) are an easy way too start, but they're too expensive, less flexible/powerful and Home Assistant is simply way more fun! Keep up the good work! 💪🏅

[SlackerLabs]

Awesome overview, sir! This video needs to be embedded on the Install page in the HA docs.

[MagDag_]

Is it ok to install it on Synology NAS?

[jasonw]

Great video thanks. Looking forward to the upcoming series.
Would be interested in learning more about your use of the Coral TPU

[carl_thunder]

I run HA in a VM on Unraid and it's been great! Everything else I run in docker.

[JiltedGeek]

Nice and clean explanation about the difference. Finally! Thank you for this. I run HA OS in a VM on my Unraid NAS. I also run multiple containers on the same NAS. Because I thought I would miss out on all the Add-ons, I didn't think of making HA a container as well. And went straight to a VM with HA OS. Now I can't wait for your video's on how to migrate from HA OS to a VM :) Keep up the great work!

[SuspiciousAra]

I have tried them all multiple times and every time i have returned to the one installed in a VM, so finally bought a mini pc for less that $100 and since then never bothered to think about options.

[aalasso]

Very nice to have found a fairly concise and technical channel.
The biggest risk in building HA as an integral part of a home is robustness. Particularly pairing to the devices themselves. I would love to hear about strategies for making a HA setup as resilient as possible. E.g. are there ways to back up the zigbee device network itself? Usin wifi, you could assign IP's to mac adresses statically. Are there anything similar for zigbee and HA?
Having multiple containers that need to talk to each other, you would want that configuration backed up too, so e.g. after an update that brakes something, you could rollback everything to last known working state. Do you have solution for that?

[Lamp]

Wow, I've been using ha for a long time, and this video explained so much I didn't understand, thanks!

[EsotericArctos]

The biggest issue I find with Home Assistant OS when talking about Frigate and Plex integrations that require a lot of storage is adding additional drives to Home Assistant. It's just a little too difficult as of today to add external storage to Home Assistant OS That's why I prefer those things running standalone. Add-ons like Deconz however are quite handy if you want everything in one place.

[MrMechaMatt]

I saw a top tip for HA where somebody was running their zigbee network on a Pi3 that then sent everything to their nuc/HA. It meant that when you restart your HA, you won't have any repairing of zigbee devices issues.

[cpyandy]

Thank you so much for your time making these Docker / HA series videos, I have a mini PC that I have Ubuntu on, and decided to add HA as a container on docker. Being new to HA, I first struggled for not being able to install addon onto HA, but after watching your videos it opens up a tons of possiblilities to my current setup. Again, appreciated!

[hv]

Fantastic presentation. You are really good at this. The info flow rate perfectly matches my uptake rate. And focusing on precisely what we need to know is so good. Keep it up friend.