As a counterpoint, I am very familiar with docker (I use it at my job as a backend developer / devops engineer), and I originally went with the docker based install, but eventually swapped to haos. I switched because addons are vastly simpler to install in haos, and any documentation you find typically assumes that is what you are using.

I haven't used Docker much at all, but I use Proxmox for everything at home (LXC containers for various web servers, Zoneminder, Plex, Pihole, etc. and the occasional VM for stuff like pfSense) on decent hardware. Which HA installation method would you recommend in this case?

My only prior HA experience was around 2017 before they had multiple options; I used a RPi which burned through microSD cards and it was pretty miserable. Gave up by 2019. Not making that mistake again.

I've been using HA since near the very beginning, and I recommend using the Proxmox Helper Scripts script that installs the HAOS VM. That's what I do. I disagree with the OP, HAOS simplifies a lot of stuff like addon installations, updates, backups, and migrations. It's the main supported way to run Home Assistant now and the one they spend the most time testing. HA is probably the most critical piece of software I run, so I want it to work, and I don't care about also running other stuff on the same system (other than addon's) because I can do that in a separate VM. Having spent years running it bare metal and in docker that certainly works fine, but HAOS made it a lot less effort to manage and has been very reliable when I ran it on a standalone machine and then when I moved it under Proxmox.

> I want to go the other way and say DO NOT use HAOS if you know anything about docker. If you have ANY experience working under linux/docker just don't bother with HAOS and save yourself the headache. You will have an incredibly better experience just running your HASS docker container by yourself.

If you don’t use HAOS you miss out on Home Assistant add-ons, which themselves sometimes integrate in Home Assistant.

You can install all of them as stand-alone docker containers.

Is there any documentation on how to do this, I've always wanted to try the voice related ones but there is no documentation to run them outside of the haos setup

Basically you need to run this docker compose file from below and enable "Wyoming" integration in HA (I think it'll detect piper & whisper and propose it automatically). Don't worry about picking model too much - you can change it later in HA UI.

  version: "3"
  services:
  ## wyoming
    whisper:
      container_name: whisper
      image: rhasspy/wyoming-whisper
      command: --model base-int8 --language en
      volumes:
        - ./whisper-data:/data
      environment:
        - TZ=Europe/Brussels
      restart: unless-stopped
      ports:
        - 10300:10300

    piper:
      container_name: piper
      image: rhasspy/wyoming-piper
      command: --voice fr-siwis-medium
      volumes:
        - ./piper-data:/data
      environment:
        - TZ=Europe/Brussels
      restart: unless-stopped
      ports:
        - 10200:10200

I run with Docker and it has been fine for me, but one issue I have is that certain things aren't documented well. For example, when I played around with the voice assistant stuff, the documentation only explained how to set it up via addons. It took a decent amount of digging and trial & error to figure out how to set it up manually. Looking again, it doesn't seem much better now.

As a Linux systems engineer I’ve looked behind the curtain at HAOS and was very impressed by how well things are implemented. Been running it for years in KVM and have never had an issue.

The only thing I run into is that when HAOS reboots, or occassionally when I restart the core, the KVM host has a short disconnect of my Zigbee stick.

Love docker and have dozens of app containers running but so much easier to do the addins on HAOS