I moved from a pi3 to an old old laptop with a broken screen doing the generic linux install with hassio.
At the time the pi wasn’t keeping up well and I had this old laptop sitting there at the edge of the recycle bin so I figured that I’d try and see how it worked. It is much faster than the pi even though it is really old.
So anyway I have been wanting to look into something newer to run HA on and I’ve been looking at black friday ads. Quite a few laptops with great specs for about the same or less money than a nuc. It was unintentional the first time, but now I’m wondering about doing it on purpose. It being its own UPS is another benefit.
So does anyone have a reason why not to use a laptop?
Can’t beat the size of the pi (and the cost if you don’t already have a machine to run Home Assistant on). Size might not matter to some people, but I don’t have a good spot to put my much larger laptop.
Of course, if form factor isn’t an issue, then a laptop is a good choice.
Since I already run blueiris for camera control on a laptop, I just run hass.io (docker version) in a linux virtual box vm on that same laptop. Runs beautifully.
I agree with Tinkerer; if you have the free hardware then use it. My old laptop out performs any Pi and its coat buttons up tightly over a number of other tasks without any loss in performance. Use what you have. especially if its a laptop. Battery support and all that!
Definitely! I was running it on Pentium M, more than 10 years old hw, until the fan kinda gave up (just making too much noise). So it’s now becoming my backup in case the PI will fail…knock on wood!
Yeah what I’m using is 12 years old by my count and even though it was (and is…for now) better than the Pi I’m thinking that new hardware couldn’t be a bad thing at this point. Most people don’t keep a car that long let alone a laptop. I guess those of us in this forum don’t account for most people though do we? Hehehe.
Well I don’t see anything wrong with it myself. I’m careful to make sure it has adequate ventilation. That is the only downside I can think of as some laptops can get air intakes clogged and run hot.
Just curious if someone from the community might have a point of why not to do it.
If the screen doesn’t turn off when closing the lid, then you might have better luck installing HA Supervised (formerly Hassio) on a generic Linux host (a full Linux host should, in theory, allow for full hardware control):
As I guess this is the best post title related with my question:
Due raspi shortage -an Rpi4 would be correct for an “unattended” HA system with very low consumption- I plan to use a laptop Ubuntu/VBox: any settings based on your experience to minimize consumption?
Vbox is because others, I plan to migrate also other automation software, so I will need another vm at least.
