Quickly going back to my starting point: I found the HA in Docker approach by scrolling to the end of the page—I had carefully read the steps to complete installation at the beginning but didn’t scroll down to the end Sorry for the confusion caused and thanks for your help!
I want to use the NUC as server for other applications as well. Therefore the Home Assistant image is not a good option. This leaves HA in docker and HA core in Docker (my current setup). I would probably choose the first when starting from scratch due to the benefit of addons. Downside is effort for the transition now, plus the setup is quite intransparent to me as a non HA / HassOS expert (it’s hard to fix issues if you don’t understand the basics what‘s going on).
not all all, they tie in quite nicely infact… nothing drives CPU in HA liek camera’s… the debate is which method is better… you categorically stated that one method is better… which I argue is not the case as you cannot speak for user preferece, skillset or use case…
I don’t find running native nuc build a waste… in fact it suits me perfectly… so for me… as a user… your statement is incorrect… My nuc is nicely tuned and optimsed and running at acceptible cpu…
This is my primary build, with remote sites running on RPI’s
Great, I’m glad that method works well for you. For me and many, many others, it doesn’t.
I didn’t, I suggested “it is the way to go”, not the be-all-and-end-all solution. Relax, I was making a suggestion to help the OP decide on a way forward.
What we as a community have to remember, is that it is OK for noobs to go an inneficient (according to thier own use case) way at the beginning… you are not painting yourself into a corner… the various methods make it super complicated to learn as a newcomer, so if installing a base hassos on a nuc gets you onto the learning curve (with loads of breathing room due to capacity) then so be it and we can’t make them feel pressured into another way… everyone finds their own way in the end… we just have to keep supporting and growing…
We as early adopters are generally more technical, but this can be intimidating and creates barriers to entry…
Typically, the supervisor updates without any input from the user. But as you can see below, the OS and HA Core updates are pretty straight forward. What I appreciate the most is that I don’t have to deal with any dependancies like python versions.
If you run a generic linux install you don’t need to bother about python versions either… python versions are irrelevant for any flavour of docker install…
Very true. When I switched to Hassio from venv, it was to get past whatever version of python that was being deprecated at the time. It has worked so well for me that I have not had a need to take ownership of the OS and Docker layers.
Because the I/O performance of the USB3, even on the RPi 4 sucks in comparison to, e.g, an NVMe flash SSD on a NUC. Often, it’s not (only) about the CPU but the I/O performance that determines what the user experience is.
I’ll grant you that for running just the Home Assistant (Core) application this isn’t a big deal. However, if you also want InfluxDB and Grafana to visualize historical information it can matter to you.
If you do want to use a Raspberry Pi4, then you can move the root filesystem to an external USB3 attached disk and see a big improvement in performance, and more importantly, more a more reliable system as compared to using an SD card. But there’s another big jump going to a SATA or NVMe/PCI attached flash device in a NUC-style platform.
I started with Pi3 and run into problems when adding homekit devices, upgraded to Pi4 , a little better but ended deleting wifi homekit devices, i have sd card problems, recently bough a new one (a model that supports quick and multiple writings) and will get it tomorrow to clone the old one, my brain tells me i will have problems again and I will not be able to have my whole setup on a Raspberry (More than 60 devices, different brands, some tasmota). Will you totally advice to move to a greater system?, NUC, which one?. an old I5 will be good enough?, loudness and power consumption are concerns.
I snagged an i5-6260 4GB / 128GB SSD about 8 months back on ebay for around $200 and haven’t looked back. If I’m going to trust my entire home (life?!?) to be automated, might as well pay up a little bit to help ensure it’s more stable than a Pi / SD card…
If I recall correctly I did a complete backup of my PI and copied that backup to local PC using SAMBA and then, once NUC was setup, copied that backup to the NUC via newly installed SAMBA and restored. Then changed my router / port redirect to NUC IP and came back pretty easily.
Definitely a ton of threads here on the forum that go into further detail on how to upgrade / backup / restore to make your life easier.
I have setup my Pi 4 to boot from an M.2 SSD on USB
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp6XW-fGVjo for instructions.
I had the SSD spare but they dont cost that much now. No worries about SD card failure.
It runs HA and has docker containers for portainer, influxDB, grafana, node-red, mosquitto and telegraph.
It is plenty fast enough for my simple setup, small house, single occupant and I have loads of other home built sensors pushing data to MQTT that is processed in either node-red or custom written software.
I have an intel NUC with ubuntu and installed HA with “pip3 install homeassistant” and 3 minutes later I started using it. No hassio, no docker, no VM, no venv. Addons I install with “pip3 install addon”.
So is this what you call HA core?
You will likely have issues if you use that machine for anything else because there could be conflicts with the dependency packages used by HA compared to those used by other apps. That’s why people tend to run in a “sand-boxed” environment (venv, docker, vm etc) so you minimize or eliminate those issues.
Only if you install it in a sandbox environment like a venv.
If you install it directly in the base OS then it uses whatever packages are installed in the base OS.
And when you update HA in a non-venv and it updates it’s required packages then you run the risk of other apps breaking that use different versions of those packages.
Or if those other apps update their packages it might break HA if it uses different versions of those packages.
That is literally the point of the recommended install method of creating the virtual environment to install HA in.
If you install HA directly in the base OS without venv, HA creates all dependency packages in .homeassistant/deps and does not use what is installed in the OS.
Sorry for the confusion caused and thanks for your help!
peace out… this (type of) debate always has the longest threads…
