I am WANTING to like Home Assistant and come back to it a few times a year to see if things have been made better, but get frustrated and put it on the backburner again for a while. There are two things that make it very frustrating, the first is having to deal with Docker and the other is trying to follow instructions other have created. Docker just adds a level of frustration for me, which is one of the main reasons I dislike it. The problem I have with following instructions is apparently those creating instructions are constantly telling me to follow tabs that do not exist. I’m not sure why these tabs do not exist, maybe Home Assistant has changed things but even instructions written or presented on YouTube this year are still showing tabs that no longer exist, such as “Configuration” and “Supervisor”. These tabs do not show up along the left column of my screen.
As to my “hardware”, I do not have any Raspberry Pi 4s available, all five that I own are currently serving dedicated purposes. The only Raspberry Pis that I am not using anymore are the original Pi 1B and 2B models. For this reason, I have had to create a VM on my XCP-ng system on an older Dell PowerEdge R710. I created a VM with 2 CPUs, 4 GiB RAM, and 250 GiB storage and installed the latest Debian Bullseye. I then followed the instructions to install Home Assistant on this VM. In my “About” info, it shows:
Home Assistant 2022.11.5
Supervisor 2022.11.2
Frontend 20221108.0 - latest
Is there a better way to install it? I see that there is a “Home Assistant OS”, which I assume is a variant of a Linux distribution but built to automatically include Home Assistant but I could not find any way to install it on a VM on my XCP-ng system, hence why I built it on a Debian Bullseye VM.
To install HAOS in a VM follow the below guide. It will always produce a 100% operating environment. Instructions are for Proxmox, which with the exception of the VM creation, everything else is the same. Long term HAOS is a better bet, IMHO, because it shields you from having to deal with two more things which are the OS and Docker (HAOS is in effect an ultra reliable software appliance).
Then you might want to follow a couple of my other guides.
RPi for HA is not the best environment. An x86-64 architecture is a better more reliable bet capable of supporting all installation methods of HA plus it is highly scalable.
since you have a debian vm, just create a python virtual environment and install HA core. if you know linux you don’t need the supervisor or OS stuff.
go here Linux - Home Assistant
then to the section that says
Not sure what instructions you’re looking at but community guides get out of date regularly as HA is constantly evolving. Also many start with a bad baseline (like an unsupported os) and set you off on the wrong foot before you even begin. There’s nothing anyone can do about this, no one has control over what content the community chooses to produce and/or update.
The HA team maintains official installation instructions here. These are always correct for the latest version of HA and never reference incorrect or missing tabs. Find your type of system in the list and pick your preferred installation type from the ones supported for that type of system. Installing HAOS in a VM is one of the preferred ways, you can find clear instructions and links to images to use there.