- Home Assistant is now part of the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit aiming to fight against surveillance capitalism and offer privacy, choice, and sustainability.
- The foundation will own and govern all Home Assistant entities, including the cloud, and has plans for new hardware and AI integration.
- Home Assistant aims to become a mainstream smart home option with a focus on privacy and user control, while also expanding partnerships and certifications.
If you’re running HA in a docker, you need to run additional containers for add-ons. This is called out in the docs. Add-ons are only for HA OS or if you install it natively, with the supervisor (HA Supervised).
If you are willing to dedicate a device to just HA you don’t need separate containers for the add-ons. For ease of use that makes a lot of sense, it’s, pretty plug and play.
Personally the Pi I’m running it on can handle a lot more than just HA so a docker makes more sense, and just have the add-ons I’m using also defined in the docker compose file.
So, add-ons, not plugins. You don’t need add-ons if you are not using HA OS, they’re irrelevant.