I've never heard about "Home Assistant Green". Seems like another step down the slippery slope of "work on my machine". First docker, than a dedicated OS, now dedicated hardware. I wonder why is Home Assistant so complex as to require all this.
I have no problem with them offering a ready-to-run hardware solution for Home Assistant, but I am annoyed that it's probably a motivating factor for why there isn't a self-installing image for HA on BYO hardware...
This is what I've been running on my generic x86-64 system for a couple of years now, 0 issues. Even migrated to a newer system recently because I wanted something that was slightly faster for ESPHome compilations.
"self-installing" being the key point. Those instructions require you to use some other piece of software to write the image onto your boot disk. In my case I used an Ubuntu livecd to download and write the image to the machine. It's obviously not a showstopper but it is slightly annoying.
It's not that it's that complex to need all of this. It's about ease of use. Home Assistant OS makes life simpler for users (such as myself), it makes it easy to use adding that run as additional docker containers, it makes plugging in USB z-wave/zigbee devices a breeze.
While it is technically no longer supported, you can still install the whole kit and caboodle using pip in a Python virtual environment, but why would you?
> You can still install the whole kit and caboodle using pip in a Python virtual environment, but why would you?
This is how I did it, instead of the container or HA OS in a VM.
If you want the simplicity of everything preconfigured, managed, and hands-off, go with HA OS, whether in a VM on a beefier machine, standalone, or the HA Green/Yellow dedicated hardware.
But if you already have a home server and want to add HA, I found just pip installing to be easier than dealing with the container.
Maybe I'm just the silly type that enjoys fiddling with Linux, but I'd argue that it actually makes more sense to install HA bare metal over a container. HA doesn't actually have any major dependencies outside of what pip installs, so setup wasn't any more annoying than via container. And then you never have to deal with container annoyances like passing hardware through to it or weird failures and misconfigurations.
Contrast this with https://frigate.video/, which has so many fragile native dependencies and a super complex stack that trying to install manually is an exercise in futility. I gave up and used the container.
