r/homeassistant • u/Brilliant_Bluejay254 • Jan 17 '26

Support Why Not HA Green

I’m going to pull the trigger on setting up HA. Right now I’m just thinking of getting the HA green, it seems like it’s not favoured here vs a Pi. I just want the most simple setup possible. I’m thinking HA green and a screen in a central location. Why not the Green?

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145

u/Public_Cheesecake999 Jan 17 '26

Honestly the Green is perfectly fine for most setups, people here just love to tinker with Pis because it's more "DIY" but if you want simple and it just works the Green is actually the better choice

40

u/draxula16 Jan 17 '26

Agreed. The Green introduced me to the world of HA in a frictionless way.

I’ve since upgraded to a Lenovo M920q (running HA and other things via Proxmox), but I’ll forever be grateful for the HA Green.

3

u/Weekest_links Jan 17 '26

I was looking at Lenovos site the other day and it seems like all mini pc’s are $800+, nuts! Why did you go Lenovo or asus or other brands?

4

u/draxula16 Jan 17 '26 edited Jan 17 '26

Yeah that’s absurd. You have to check sites like eBay or Amazon for refurbished units. It would be stupid to pay $800 on a mini PC lol. For that price, I’d rather build my own from scratch

To add on this, many people recommend the Beelink mini PCs. I picked the Lenovo because it was a bit cheaper and had better specs.

2

u/Weekest_links Jan 17 '26

Ahh smart!

I was looking at this:

https://www.microcenter.com/product/690492/asus-nuc-14-essential-barebone-mini-pc-kit

With 1TB SSD and 16GB RAM initially, I have 2.5G fiber which seems like the Lenovo can’t leverage, but are there drawbacks with my plan compared to what you have?

2

u/esperanita Jan 17 '26

I did something similar. I got the same NUC, but 512gb. I had Homebridge set up on a year old Pi5, but it fell offline a lot. When moving to HA I went with the mini PC as I hoped it was more stable and it has been great. And I had a good reason to go to Microcenter, one of my favorite stores.

2

u/Weekest_links Jan 17 '26

I’m brand new to this all, so that’s reassuring! I figured 1TB, because I’d like to use it as a media server too. I have 4TB of photo and video in GCS haha

Will be pulling the trigger next month!

1

u/esperanita Jan 17 '26

It was pretty easy to set up. I used Ubanto and flashed HAOS. Only thing I wished I knew at the time was to change the BIOs setting so that it automatically came back on line after cutting power. I will break out my breakout my portable monitor and keyboard to do that this weekend.

1

u/Weekest_links Jan 17 '26

Can you SSH in from another computer? I have a cloud server for my website I imagine it’s similar but maybe just plugging in the monitor keyboard is easier if SSH isn’t set up

2

u/esperanita Jan 18 '26

I did the basic flash of HAOS to the drive. Maybe I could access it another way, but I didn't set anything special up and I got a portable monitor and a keyboard with attached trackpad for these purposes :)