Earlier this year “Hass.io” was renamed to “Home Assistant” in an attempt to simplify things. Feedback from the community found this to be a bit confusing still. As part of an effort to improve the documentation and support for installation methods, the team wants to improve this name and get it right.
You can see the four officially supported install methods in the recent Installation Methods & Community Guides Wiki blog post. Here is the description of the install method we are renaming:
Home Assistant
Full installation of our all-inclusive home automation system. Best in class home automation is complemented with a UI for configuring your system, making backups and safe updates with automatic rollback.
This method was previously known as “Hass.io”, and includes our Operating System (HassOS), the Supervisor, and add-ons. It can be run on various single-board computers or in a virtual machine.
What’s a good name that describes the above? Some of the ideas discussed on GitHub are:
Home Assistant One
Home Assistant OS
Home Assistant Complete
Home Assistant All-in-One
Home Assistant Suite
Home Assistant Hub
Home Assistant Plus
Home Assistant Prime
Open to suggestions from the community, now is your chance to make your voice heard. You can either suggest a totally new name or tell us which of the above you like or hate. It would help if you listed the reasons why you’re for or against a certain name, as that feedback will help everyone else in the thread come up with better names.
Ideally we’d like whatever name is chosen to self-describe the installation method, although this isn’t necessarily a requirement.
Please keep this thread focused on topic of picking a better name rather than critiquing previous decisions.
I like Plus or Prime or Zero…
Zero because it’s ground zero baseline experience for the full home assistant.
Plus or Prime are both quite descriptive… Prime HA experience or HA Plus as it’s Core Plus etc.
I’ll repeat my suggestions from the Architecture repo for the four different installation methods:
Home Assistant Plus
The “works”; burger, bacon, bun, lettuce, tomato, mayo, and onions. This is the Artist Formerly Known as hass.io.
Home Assistant Minus
“Hold the onions.” Subtract the operating system from Plus and you get Minus. You must provide the linux operating system (Debian). This is currently known as Home Assistant Supervised.
Home Assistant Coretainer
Burger in a bun and nothing else. This is Home Assistant Core in a Docker container, recently renamed to Home Assistant Container. Why Coretainer? To indicate its a subtle variation of Home Assistant Core.
Home Assistant Core
The burger itself and nothing else. Plain and simple.
There are two categories:
Plus/Minus are very similar, and include many things, except Minus lacks the OS.
Coretainer/Core are very similar with the only difference being one is delivered as a docker container.
There’s a substantial difference between Plus/Minus and Coretainer/Core and that’s why I chose to assign those two categories different naming themes.
I would steer away from suggesting that Core (the virtualenv-based installation) is inferior, as it is actually more flexible in a lot of ways.
Perhaps the traditional way of looking at this is upside-down: at the moment, the OS image is viewed as top of the tree, with other alternatives provided begrudgingly — I understand that’s not the case, but that’s how it can feel.
I quite like the “Core” nomenclature for the base system, so to me, the “Home Assistant OS” makes the most sense for “Core packaged up into an image with an OS”.
I personally like Home assistant All in one. That’s what I instantly thought of before I saw the suggestions.
I think of Home Assistant Core as literally just home assistant without the OS or supervisor. To me all in one exactly describes what it is the all elements of home assistant in one.
Home assistant ONE could also work. I also like Home assistant complete.
IMHO Home assistant prime implies some kind of extra benefit or functionality which might mislead noobs.
Definitely All-in-One… We have had enough confusions with naming recently, so let’s use something that actually reflect situation and do not add to this confusion!
I’d go with “Home Assistant All-in-One”, because it exactly describes what it is and is really easy to understand what is meant, also in non-English speaking countries.
"Home Assistant All-in-One":
a complete package that has everything on board to get you up and running. It sounds attractive to newcomers, as “Oh, if I get this I have everything I need to get started”. It also indicates that the other options are more advanced or tailored installation methods: use the All-in-One unless you have a specific installation use case. Abbreviation would be something like HA AiO if needed.
That matches with two of the other names perfectly:
"Home Assistant Container": a containerized HA Core (the name == what you get)
"Home Assistant Core": The really down to the bones core functionality to run HA (the name == what you get)
"Home Assistant Supervised" is a bit of an outlier due to the technical naming and might be difficult to say “the name == what you get” - but this naming is not up for discussion. Techies will know what it is though.
The problem with using numbers in product names is where do you go with the next version?
Home Assistant One 2.1?? Home Assistant One v 2.1??
Where does the product name end and the versioning begin?
Home Assistant / Home Assistant Core
is apt for an installation package
TBH, this was simple and never misunderstood, it’s “Home Assistant” and it’s “just the package”
Home Assistant Container/Cortainer/inDocker
is pretty clear you are dealing with a “containerised” package
HA Total (HAT), HA Complete (HAC), HA Image (HAI), or simply HA Supervised
Is a complete solution. It is an OS for existing metal, it’s an image for virtualisation. It’s Everything.
I do think consideration should be given to how it will be abbreviated and used in conversation, which does slightly compromise Core and Container (another reason “Home Assistant Core” should have just been left at “Home Assistant”)
joke: Homeassistant One Under Supervised Environment (HOUSE)!
Back to using “One” as in “one-and-all” or “only one” is just going to get more confusing down the track. “If it’s the only one why are there these others?”
I would suggest focusing on the installation type (which is mostly the same anyway), and just have:
Home Assistant (with or without Core) (installed in any OS)
Hmm. Thanks for asking. Since I’m one of the very confused ones, let me say a few words.
I’m currently trying to adapt to the new naming schemes. What I like is that they all begin with Home Assiatant. HA Core also seems logical, it just being the Python core run in a venv.
Please don’t make the mistake many make, calling the different ones artificial names. We’ve seen where this leads: No one can remember/distinguish things like “Bla ONE”, “Blupp ONE”, “Eta PRIME” or the like! The “olden” names did make some sense (like “Raspbian”: Raspberry+Debian; “Hassbian”: Home Assistant Debian", etc.).
So please no fancy names, just names that are decriptive and don’t confuse, like maybe:
Home Assistant — not any version or install style, just the name of what we see, maybe for the docs
Home Assistant Core — a good one, I think
Home Assistant Supervised — doubtful, but might be supervised containers (or supervised Linux installs??)
Home Assistant Container — a good one, I think
Now for the all-complete (including an OS) install. I’d very probably go for a simple name, so not “One”, “Prime”, “Plus”, “Extra”—these are not speaking names.
Maybe really a truly simple name:
Home Assistant Full (my preference), or
Home Assistant All-In-One (great name but maybe too long), or
Home Assistant Complete?
For abbreviations, we’re already lost, because HA Core, HA Container and HA Complete could all be HAC. I’d have loved to have unambigous abbreviations …
This is the right correct term for what nearly all of us use. Concise, precise, technical.
What is a software appliance according to Wikipedia?
A software appliance is a software application combined with just enough operating system (JeOS) to run optimally on industry-standard hardware (typically a server) or in a virtual machine.
Then from there people can refer to specific different types of the “packaging” such as:
(HomeAssistant) Baremetal Appliance, such as RPi, ODroid, NUC, etc
(HomeAssistant) Virtual Appliance (VM images)
(HomeAssistant) Docker Appliance
Whatever else is there, you get the gist.
It will be easy for people to easily identify or refer to which one they’re using and to document (since you can refer to all these versions as “HomeAssistant Appliance” which would include ALL of these ready-made solutions; or be as detailed as “HomeAssistant Virtual Appliance” to refer to the VM images.
HomeAssistant (with or without “Core”) for the software itself, it is just a piece of software that requires an OS and other components.
I don’t like prime or plus or premium, theses have been polluted by other companies to imply that there is a subscription model implied.
All in one - is good and descriptive but also a bit of a mouthful.
At first I didn’t like ‘one’ but I’m coming round to think it’s the best alternative though perhaps as @Madivad implies there could be people waiting for version ‘two’
How about AIO - standing for all in one ? Or does that mean something rude in another language?
I think zero and minus have very negative connotations
So AIO - as the new hass.io or as marketing people would say AI1 (no please don’t do that)
Home Assistant AIO
Home Assistant Supervised
Home Assistant Core
Home Assistant Coretainer (the only one of Taras’s (@123) I like which is unusual for me )
Edit: full - implies the others are deficient in some way
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