More like solitary confinement
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Surely since you are only just starting out with HA anyway, you could use a short patch lead and have the HA RPi right next to your routerā¦ it runs headless so there is no need to have it anywhere overly accessible.
As the author of the guide, let me explain. The method in the guide works without issue - however, it is not an officially supported method based on recent changes discussed and made per ADR14. No official dev support will be provided if you face a problem, however, the community will always help.
I donāt see Home Assistant as a walled garden. As already noted, you can run Supervised or Container if you want more control over the environment, you can edit/add/change individual integrations and introduce custom components, you can contribute to the project via Github and the forums to assist with making it better for all user. Walled garden, it is not.
I have been a user for over 3 years and have run every iteration there has been, Hassbain, Venv, Hass.io, HA OS, the list goes on. In the past, it was far harder to have a complex yet successful HA instance running. Today, it is a breeze. I almost never face a problem with an update, and have many different technologies, RF433, Zigbee, WiFi and hubs all working seamlessly together. In my home, I run Promox with 3 VMs for my main machine, and a Pi3 with Supervised (as per the linked guide) as my backup machine, and donāt face any of the issue you have described. I also run a Pi3 instance at my parents house and another Proxmox instance in my business, all work flawlessly 99.9% of the time.
We see often on the forums people who are experienced programmers or devs face issue with HA. Take off your programmers hat, read the docs and follow the examples provided. If you need help, ask - the HA community is awesome. Search the forums, you will most likely find whatever issue you are facing has been covered, if it hasnāt, start a new post and provide detail and someone will help. If something isnāt documented well, update the docs - anyone can do it.
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I found HA to be very easy to use. Maybe itās because Iāve been using Linux since first loading Slackware Linux back in 1993 from 30 floppy disks on a Packard Bell 486 sx 25MHz. It had no math co-processor so you had to compile the Linux kernel with the math co-processor emulator enabled. I soon after upgraded to a 250 MB hard drive and a 486 dx2 66MHz. What a difference in performance that made! Iāve always loved python and have used is since the late 90s.
Iāve tried HA every which way possible including via python on windows. I found that I much prefer running HA on Linux in a docker image with Supervisor installed. Iāve tried running on raspberry pi but I have 20+ cameras and no Pi can handle them or all the custom apps and scripting I run on the device. I settled on a fanless Asrock motherboard with ssd drive. Itās not super fast but itās plenty powerful to handle everything Iāve thrown at it. With a power supply that adjusts fan speed automatically based on power consumption, itās just about silent.
I have run into wireless issues using various older Raspberry Pi devices and I tracked the problem to the high power requirement of the USB wireless dongle. No matter how many amps the power supply can produce, the Pi devices were just not able to provide enough power for the WiFi dongle to properly function. There was no way to easily get an Ethernet cable to the location so I first went with a tp-link mini wireless router which allows you to bridge Ethernet to wireless. I then switched to a powerline network adapter. I know use a different wifi adapter with a different chip and itās much less power hungry and I no longer have issues.
Another network issue I keep running into is having trouble figuring out which network manager the Linux OS is using. It seems like I can install the same linux flavor on 3 different devices and 3 different network managers will be used. I consider myself an expert level Linux Engineer but having 30 different ways to manage the network across the various Linux Distributions is a real pain.
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Thanks everyone. This is all super usefull information. The getting started section of the docs should have some pointers to it.
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iām a relative linux newbie but getting better. after working a little bit with piās and other tiny minimal iot type machines now, i donāt understand why there isnt more interest in using HA with the openWRT os. It seems to be a much wider distro for tiny appliance type machines, rather than something like raspbian distros. dunno, maybe im missing something obvious.
HA has itās own OS, thatās what you get when you install HA OS.
for people who think of HA (i.e. Hass core) as an app that runs on linux, who would want to use the HA os?
i could easily see buying a gl or ubnt router that ships using openWRT os and wanting to run ha on it. not totally sure, but i think openWRT supports dockers to make a supervised ha install possible.
Yeahā¦ what a pitty that itās deployable only on very limited HW range. Itās rather part of embed system and because of this it looses all pros. For sure itās not āfor people who know half as much as you do. These people do not understand what SSH is, let alone any linux commands.ā (quote from some posts above)
IMHO HA is one of worst designed systems Iāve ever seen. Or to be fair: at least it behaves like this from end-user/maintainer POV (letās exclude a few fans for whom everything works as expected and never caused issues). If I had to guess, I would say it started as school project to expore some exotic approaches, not necessarily appropriate ones (yaml, inflexible and limited GUI). All glued together just to survive exams. This is what school projects are about, isnāt it?
Eventually turned into longer projectā¦ 7 years of development still without gold release speaks for itself. Inconsistent integrations ie feature-wise, incomplete/outdated documentation, needs of system restart to apply almost every small change even for main integrations. GUI still must be āhackedā with use of custom/community components (not officially suported) because itās not possible to make such basic customizations like color changes. And even with that in hands itās still not easy to achieve it without learning yeat another meta-language (forget about css and javascript on FE).
It boasts 1600 integrations. But I can bet most of them is disfunctional, not fully implemented, inconsistent, requires quirks and a lot of manual work just to make it work (or even to remove it)
Recently I can see some movement towards āthe betterā but imo if not changed fast enough, the project is doomed to end up to be used by small group of users and eventually disapear.
Sorry for tough words. Maybe for some it might sound unfair. Maybe it is entirely not true. But until now nobody even tried to answer OPās question: why is it made so difficult? What is the idea behind this?
To me some decissions made in the past are at least āstrangeā. Maybe the goal was to create a system installable/maintainable by pros only (to make money)? Problem is that the system is still in beta phase being unreliable and not production ready.
Letās face a truth: IT IS difficult (or at least non intuitive) for skilled ITs. Itās not accessible for common non-IT person for sure.
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It will run on a number of devices, but why are you so obsessed with running it on some ramdon router or whatever anyway when you can run it on a simple SBC? A RPi is cheaps as chips, uses hardly any power and can be hidden away to just work. If thats not powerful enough for you, run a NUC, or VM, or whateverā¦ there are HEAPS of options. Just because it might not run on some openWRT router doesnāt mean itās bad. openWRT is for people living in the past anywayā¦ get Ubiquiti gear and enjoy a real network solution.
So donāt use it, walk away and please donāt complain on here.
Every doc page can be edited by the community. Feel free to spend your time submitting update PRāsā¦ just like others spend their free time bringing you this FREE software.
Why are people so keen to install HA, then want to do random stuff in the back end, then complain that they canāt? If you want a HA system that JUST WORKS, install HA OS and not have to do any backend stuff. If you so desperately want to play with Linux in the background, install Core or Supervised. Itās not hard.
Iām just sick of these threads that bad mouth a free software package produced by people in their spare time, which for most people works just fine. My system is fairly complex now after running HA for about 3 years. Sure, there have been a few dramas along the way but nothing that wasnāt either caused by my bad coding or a release which broke something, and then was fixed very shortly after.
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Ehmā¦ okay, I just pointed out HA has itās own OS, which is supported on quite some devices and as a VM as well. Never in my life would I run the system that controls my home on my routerā¦
I will not comment on the rest of your post, Iām sick and tired of people ranting about a FREE software, nobody forces you to use HA, there are countless of other smart home solutions. Feel free to try them and find something that better fits your needs.
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This is the only relevant line from your entire post.
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Please keep it civil people. Letās try to keep this a discussion and not a flame war.
It isnāt made difficult, YOU donāt get it. That seems to be a difference, donāt you think? If you would be a āskilled ITā, you wouldnāt need to read more than two pages to get HomeAssistant up and running.
Simple as that.
If you want a more customized experience (=installation) you will have to do a little bit more. Sorry, but all I see in your post is you donāt seem to have enough knowledge, and are now desperate to hide that fact.
So letās go through your post, and see what we can find there:
Not true, you can run Home Assistant Core on literally any computer. Pi, NUC, old Laptop - with Linux (nearly all distros) and Windows. What else did you want? The OS of a russian space rocket? Try the Python venv or docker.
Not true. Home Assistant with HomeAssistantOS is, Home Assistant Core is not. See the answer above for all the possibilities. Despite the idea that it looses, I would say, it wins. I can choose which way I want to go. More or less controllable, in comparison to easy or not so easy to use.
This is not a truth question, as it is your opinion, as you said. It doesnāt cover the reality, but you are very much entitled to your opinion. My opinion in this case is very different.
- Inconsistent integrations ie feature-wise Name an example.
- incomplete/outdated documentation Documentation is a point, but incomplete is as well not true. If you say otherwise, name an example.
- needs of system restart to apply almost every small change even for main integrations If you donāt like that, please refrain from any updates to windows as well. I can see your point, what you are missing here is, not everyone is acting like you do. I for one had my last reboot of the HA machine (RPi4) two and a half months ago, my last HA restart was two and a half weeks ago, and to be fair half an hour ago, as I made an update to 0.113. I donāt see any difference to most of the worldwide used computers. Maybe you can explain that further, to make sense of it.
Not true. The basic UI is enough for a normal experience. If you use the automatic feature to populate new entries in lovelace, you will have full control. You might have to use a custom_component for some things, but all these are already there, maybe not as comfortable as one wants, but that is a different story, so your comment is not true.
Depends solely on your needs and wants. As above, the system gives you everything after setup. If you want more comfort, you will have to learn how that works. I canāt think of any software, where you wouldnāt need to learn a little bit. With HACS I personally would call it a breaze to install custom_components. Itās UI driven, and the installation is around four or five clicks. Sounds fair to me.
Not true. Betting is a nice idea, but it isnāt a solid base for a discussion, especially, if someone, like you, condems a whole system. So betting is out, name examples. If you can name just three outdated/incomplete/require quirks integrations, I will make a signature for my account, and will let it stand there for my next 50 posts: āMaxym was right, Home Assistant has a lot of disfunctional/outdated integrations!ā Go for it, but donāt come around with sh*t like there is a typo in the documentation - I want real disfunction and not only āisnāt working for meā.
And last but not least: not true. I can call myself a skilled IT, at least my payroll slip tells me so (not money wise, title wise) and I donāt have any problems in installing/using my Home Assistant. And I do have people around me, that are everything, but not skilled IT people. A friend of mine doesnāt even have a PC/Laptop. I gifted him one of my old Pi3B+, and he is running a small but nice installation of HA on it. Not installed or maintained by me. I havenāt heard anything unusual in the last three months from him. System is running, no problems, just working.
To sum that up, I get the feeling, it may be you, and not all people, that have problems with HA. Maybe itās your approach?
And no, Iām not sorry, if this sounds rude. I hate, that people nowadays seem to think, their personal view of things needs to be accepted and respected by everyone else. No! If you would have started your rant with arguments and examples, than it might be more acceptable, but thisā¦this only shows your inability to get the system.
And donāt get me wrong, I have a lot of problems, with the way things are handled with Home Assistant. I find the communication a mess (<= diplomatic speech), a real leadership inside the development team doesnāt seem to exist, and being a friendly developer is def. not in the job description. But that is a different story, as it doesnāt affect the product.
EDIT: @petro If this post isnāt civil enough, please feel free to delete it. 
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One other thing I forgot to mention in my earlier post: Before starting with HA I had basically ZERO Linux experience, yet had no issues at all getting HA going, including stepping up from the old HassOS / HassIO setup to Ubuntu / HA Supervised.
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Before starting with HA I had basically ZERO Linux experience
Same here, I actually started on windows with the built in linux framework and installed core, it was a huge mess, always issues. However after a week or two with that I installed a desktop version of ubuntu- kubuntu and installed core in a venv. smooth as butter.
Everyone has had issues with HA, its in the nature of opensource beta software. It just happens sometimes.
But now after a year with it ā still running headless on kubuntu, on a dell minitower with 4g ram its nearly flawless. Over 50 devices on my network,
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I have alot of information at my fingertips and with all the custom components I have it setup exactly how I want it to look, feel, and provide a cool experiance in my house.
If an air freshener coming on after you flush a toilet, and a motion detector on a fan which adjusts its speed according to room temperature isnt sweet, well I dunno what isā¦
Youāve just given me an ideaā¦! Hmmm
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Its absolutely fantastic. the air freshener is an oil diffuser flashed with tasmota too.
One of the most condescending posts on here, yet you still use it, still ask for asistantance for your issues.
and yet the truth is, thousands use it everyday, without major issues, could it be, you?
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To accurately understand why things are the way they are would require input from the projectās founder and architect. However, he doesnāt normally get involved in this sort of historical analysis of past design decisions. All I can offer you is what Iāve gathered over the course of my involvement with this project (~2.5 years). If anything I say below is inaccurate, I trust another community member will correct the record.
The problems you described appear to be related to Home Assistantās bespoke operating system (basically a lightweight hypervisor for docker). Itās included in what was originally referred to as hass.io, which was offered as a means of simplifying the installation and maintenance of Home Assistant (and related home automation services, like mosquitto, nginx, Node-red, etc via an āAdd-Onā eco-system).
Within the past year, hass.io's name has changed twice (now called Home Assistant OS) and, most importantly, has been promoted to flagship status. It is now the recommended installation method. From the core development teamās perspective, the entire system, from operating system to UI, is under their control. In theory, this āappliance approachā makes it easier to manage the UX.
Obviously, the constraints imposed by the bespoke operating system might not suit some environments (or the needs of more experienced users). There are three other ways to install Home Assistant, with increasing freedom of choice, and all are officially supported to run on Debian. Unofficially (meaning support comes exclusively from the community) they all run on other distros as well.
Have you tried openHAB? Itās another open-source home automation project (10 years old, if Iām not mistaken) and is officially supported on Raspberry Pi OS and other Linux distros (it doesnāt have a bespoke operating system). Itās written in Java and allegedly has a good Zigbee binding (openHABās term for āintegrationā). It might be worth your time to investigate it to determine if itās a better fit for your needs.