Comment by Fwirt

Home Assistant is the poster child for an incredible open-source project. There are community plugins for a mind-boggling number of devices, and crazy functionality that seems like magic. (Flash a $5 ESP32 with some pre-built image and you can connect HA to any BLE devices it can see.)

However, it is very much a product by nerds, for nerds. My wife loves it but she's not going to bother writing YAML to create her own dashboards. She used to write simple web forms so I have no doubt she could, but it's not something that appeals to the average person. Imaging a machine is beyond the realm of what the average consumer is willing to do.

HAOS runs really well as a VM image and doesn't use much in the way of system resources, if you have a home server with 4GB of extra memory you can throw it in KVM and it'll be happy as a clam. I've never had it brick itself.