This kind of pushed me away from HA. I've ended up using integrations built using hc [0] to bridge devices to HomeKit, either existing or ones I've built, and then using Promtheus to collect metrics. It's not something that 'just works', but I feel much happier with how it works than HA.

[0] - https://github.com/brutella/hc

For what it's worth frenck does not represent Home Assistant and the first sentence of his profile is "Slightly assholic at first sight"...

That said you have a point but in my usage of Home Assistant almost since birth when it was a single pip install command I can tell you the sheer functionality, integrations, etc make getting it fully running a nightmare. Not to mention from their perspective actually supporting it almost impossible. Maybe this speaks to a wider problem but I'm very happy to install it with docker on the distro and hardware of my choice and have everything more-or-less just work.

I referenced the operating system approach here because it's the quickest and easiest path to get up and running on a Raspberry Pi and therefore relevant to the article.

I run it in a VM and don't mind it; it's got the updater, it feels pretty self contained.

I even do USB passthrough to give it access to my z-wave stick.

I've been running homeassistant installed by pip3 for years now (before they even had a os) and that has always worked fine.