I run my own a VM.

I was sceptical about running in a OS that I can’t run my normal updates and automations on but HA OS has been rock solid and easy. Plus you get a few more features

HA OS is the way to go.

You don’t want to have to think about it. HA OS just works. You set it up and let it run.

There’s no sense in trying to kerfuffle other things into it. You don’t want to do too much on the Pi anyway because it’ll lower the responsiveness of Home Assistant slightly. If you want a server that does things, buy a separate NAS and run it alongside HA OS.

I’ve run both, and the OS version is much more stable and easier to keep running. Whether you use an rpi or a VM, use the dedicated OS and save yourself the heartache of trying to get your hardware working with docker.

I used a ton of AddOns, really practical because they also embed themselves easily into the rest of Home Assistant. I would go for the HA OS. But I also do wish there was a AddOn to install random docker images.

You can go supervised! You still have most of the operating system available to your needs and you can still use add-ons. I use it for years and it works like a charm

I’m running the docker version as I’m also using the rpi for other things, like imageview and pi hole. I don’t really miss addons, the only annoying thing is that most documentation assumes you’re running ha os.

But if you don’t plan to use it for anything else than HA, I’d go for HA OS.

I recommend HA OS. What happened to me is that I used docker, got everything set up how I liked it, then had to move over to HA OS when I needed a specific add on and didn’t have any other solution.

If you don’t already have a plan for other services, might not make sense to use docker, too.

There’s nothing that you can’t do with docker that you can do with addons, but many things you can do with docker that you can’t do with addons.

Addons are marginally easier to setup but if you have technical skills, docker is also not a lot of work. You can use something like Portainer to get a similar easy interface. So I think it’s down to if you have the technical skills for docker.

I run ha supervised and I do both, but the system does complain that I do that.

I run the docker because it’s really easy to migrate to another machine if I needed. I just rsync the data and re-run the yaml on the new machine and I’m back up within seconds.

home assistant in docker is definitely not for the feint of heart! the networking requirements are actually quite intense, and really don’t map well to virtual networks like dockers uses

… among other issues

HAOS on a pi; i’ve tried the docker thing time and time again, and the next chance i get in blowing it all away and starting on real hardware again

I’d always run HAOS. When you need Docker containers which are not available as add-ons I would look for a machine that can run Proxmox so you can run a Docker VM and a HAOS vm in parallel.

I definitely prefer HA in a VM, that way it can do its own thing and I won’t accidentally break something.

I run HA OS and from my experience updating and installing add-ons is seamless. Creating backups and restoring (had to replace a corrupt SD Card a while ago) was also no issue.
Add-ons I have installed

• Advanced SSH Terminal
• ESP Home
• Home Assistant Google Drive Backup
• VS Code Server
• Maria DB

HACS for a few integrations:

• YT Music Player
• Waste Collection Schedule

nothing too fancy.

I run a second Pi with an SSD for docker containers or native OS installs (gitea, drone-ci, pi-hole, etc.)

I started out running HA in a docker container on a NUC (everything configured in a docker compose file). Documentation around everything was pretty poor at the time (I’m not sure if this has improved since then), so I ended up feeling too confused on where to even begin expanding from vanilla HA.

I ended up picking up a RPi 4 (and SSD and enclosure) and have been happily running HA OS since then on the Pi. If that ever fails on me, I may go back to a docker instance.

I’d recommend you try whichever is the most convenient first (probably the docker approach, unless you already have the Pi on hand). Give it a month or two, try to setup up a few things you’re interested in, and then decide if you’re satisfied with that setup or want to try the other option.

Its not super hard to manually set up with docker or podman but you have to deal with integrating and updating the add-ons yourself. I ran out of CPU on a pi4 (due to a buggy websocket client in the end) and moved to a small form factor x86_64 server under Rocky. I ran manually using just containers (podman in this case) and it worked fine but integrating and updating the equivalent of add-ons was a lot of manual plumbing work that I don’t find much fun anymore.

I switched back to hassos, but under KVM. This for me is the best of both worlds: I get the fully managed/integrated work of Frenck and friends for HA and can still access and manage the machine normally (and use it for other services).

There’s nothing remotely realtime about the python code in the core HA, it works well in a reasonbly provisioned VM (4 cores, 8G ram) backed by a good SSD. There is some religion in the community about not using VM’s: it is a layer of complexity and I understand why folks on discord don’t want to help people with it, but technically it works well for this class of app.