Help me not make a stupid mistake: choosing the right installation method still confuses me

Hi all,

I am moving and as part of that starting my home assistant install from scratch (it’s moving to new hardware, too). I want to get some advice before installing to get an idea if what I think makes sense actually makes sense.

I’ll be running this on essentially a NUC. I went this way because I want this to also do a handful of other things, such as being a Plex media server. I am fairly technical and can handle most things that involve googling error messages.

Previously I had what is now called a Core installation (I think), basically direct installation of the python app. Worked fine, but isn’t a highly recommended method from what I can tell.

I looked at directly installing HA OS, but this seemed limiting to the other things I’d be able to use the server to do. (I wasn’t sure, though, if this is true?)

I saw HA supervisor which gives you a lot of the shinies of HA OS, but seems highly discouraged and (iirc) the devs wanted to stop supporting it. Seems good reason to use another method.

That would point to using HA Container, which seems the best option with my limited knowledge.

The main thing I wasn’t sure about is if it could make sense to run HA OS as a VM on my host machine? This would give me the full experience and still allow me to use the system for other things easily. I haven’t really mucked about with VMs much but could stumble my way through if it made sense to do so. The easy installation of addons seems very nice (right now I have manual container management of, eg, zwavejs, which I believe would get managed by HA OS), but I wasn’t sure if running VMs is a hassle.

Any thoughts on people who have done this or have more knowledge on this?

Thanks! I have read a lot of threads but at this point I’m just getting more lost in minutiae.

There are two “recommended” options:

  • HAOS - takes over your entire computer, but makes it easy to install software in the form of add-ons
  • Container - Home Assistant in Docker, install other software however you want

Core is fine if you’ve got experience with Linux and building software from source. Supervised is just a trap.

Sounds like a good option to me, use KVM and it’s pretty simple to do. Then you can run whatever you want as an add-on, or any other way you want.

If your NUC has at least 4GB RAM go the Proxmox way as a hypervisor. This is the best cost-free installation of any other system out there. You can use HA and then you have VMs and containers for anything else Linux or Windows.

Check my guides how to go about getting the best experience with Proxmox and HAOS with full detailed step-by-step instructions.

HowTo configure ProxMox VE 7.1 - steps to success (update final)
HowTo install Home Assistant (HA) OS in ProxMox VE (PVE) 7.1
HowTo install & configure Windows 10 in a VM on Proxmox VE 7.1 - step-by-step
HowTo install & configure Windows 11 in a VM on Proxmox VE 7.1 - step-by-step

HowTo setup HAOS - Part 0 - Architecture & Design
HowTo setup HAOS - Part 1 - Frontend Architecture & Design

HowTo install Tailscale on Debian, Linux, Proxmox, Ubuntu, Windows

HowTo install Pi-hole in Proxmox VE, possibly the best ad blocker and privacy protector
HowTo configure Pi-hole, possibly the best ad blocker and privacy protector

I have an intel nuc7pjyh with ubuntu and HA core, no virtualizations. It runs very good, no problems. The only disadvantage is that I have to download custom integrations with “wget”. If there is any problem, troubleshooting is much easier if you use HA core.
And: every additional component is a possible point of failure.