addons VS operating-system

If you have a broker set up in HomeAssistant it’s doesn’t really matter where that broker is as long as HomeAssistant is configured to use it and can connect. It sounds like it was hosted remotely, on paid hosting perhaps. I’ll hazard a guess since you mentioned lights that it’s using zigbee2mqtt so that addon will need to be setup too to use the same broker.

The HASSIO DuckDNS plugin can do it all for you too - https://github.com/home-assistant/addons/tree/master/duckdns

mosquitto is an add-on that runs as a docker container in the supervisor. It can be added and configured in the Add-on Store. The same can be done for NodeRed and Zigbee2mqtt. you could also add in some Zwave support to expand device compatibility with your smarthome.

Home Assistant add-on Almond on Github

Zwave here. ZigBee here, here, and here. ZigBee is a mess because it isn't tightly controlled like Z-wave is. Some devices work better with deConz or ZHA or whatever. I'm not really sure what works best with what, I avoid ZigBee for this reason (and a few others).

One thing that is throwing me off is controlling my z-wave devices. Prior to HA I have been using SmartThings which was working fine (minus the app switching). I integrated SmartThings into HA and the transition was seamless but I noticed that a lot of the HA integrations require Z-Wave JS.

I've posted https://github.com/home-assistant/addons/issues/1887 in this thread about issues with Mosquitto but references other issues I believe are related.

I installed the NGINX Proxy addon the other day and that seemed to go fine. Only problem I'm having is with some strange errors that keep occurring over and over.

https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/pull/3248

BTW found exact same issue with homeassistant browsing the internet; Add support for Intel GMAC Ethernet controller (#2589) (#2593) · home-assistant/operating-system@9ca836f (github.com)

HAOS (https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system) is not "vanilla" linux, and I have somewhat little experience of linux, although using raspberry-based systems (Domoticz, Pihole, etc) and basic usage of unix mainframes since early 90s. But the question I could not find answer for by googling is, could I use HAOS to farm chia as well, or is it too much optimized towards HA usage to reasonably serve as a chia farming computer too?

The main issue with the 3A+ is the 512MB of RAM. Combined with only having one USB port and no Ethernet, I would not advise using a pi3A+ as a sustainable foundation for HA.

Home assistant was the last thing I had running as a VM, but recently switched over to running it in a LXC container with their ContainerOS (i think that's what they call it). I would say don't do it (at least not yet), and go with their full OS in a VM (dl link to correct KVM/qcow2 version). I say don't start with HomeAssistantContainer b/c you lose Supervisor and the add-on store, and it's a bit less straighforward to get installed.

One thing to notice, I have been able to successfully boot Home Assistant OS Generic x86-64 https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system which is using kernel 5.15+ and I don't know why I am able to boot HAOS (maybe they are using uncompressed kernel?), but not other general or special Linux distributions.

Raspberry Pi 4 64-bit

hass.io builds the whole gamut of images. There's a list at the bottom of the github page https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/releases/tag/8.0.rc2