My 2 cents go for Zigbee2MQTT, Mosquitton, and Domoticz. Domoticz has it's problems, but it's been a faithful workhorse for me for the past 6 or more years.
One way is also to use HAOS but it is kinda limited.
Current stack for me is HA+traefik+Z2M+Frigate+Mosquitto. All running in containers, on top of Debian. Works perfectly.
I have been thinking of migrating my setup from a docks container to HAOS on metal.
I have like 1 dozen Intel j5105 boxes, might as well use them.
HAOS in a principle is a lightweight immutable distro for running containers; the HA itself is the same container that you would be running if you went the Docker path.
In my case, I have my IoT toys in a separate VLAN; HAOS needed to have access to both, main LAN (for the frontend) and IoT LAN (to talk to the devices). Configuring that meant installing container with SSH, making sure I can connect to the host via that (the featured "Terminal & SSH" addon won't allow that, you need the other, "Advanced SSH & Web Terminal"), and then using nmcli to configure the network.
I like the concept of paring down and organizing my myraid docker containers into native HAOS "add-ons".
That plus having a better update cycle and less hardware pass through headaches is appealing to me.
I've also been encountering a bug in my docker build pipeline that freezes my ability to remove a container until I restart it. Pretty frustrating.
This is not the most popular route and therefore also less supported my advice:
- use a raspberry-pi with Home Assistant OS or buy one of their self made raspberry-pi alternatives Home Assistant Yellow etc.
You can run docker but it's still not straightforward because then you need to passthrough like USB Devices etc, I would recommend against it.
And from there use the yamls to define a very basic config like language, location etc (I'm not sure that you even need to do that). But only use the GUI from there on.
Everything can be done with the GUI, I haven't touched my yaml files in years.
And I regularly upgrade versions too, haven't had any upgrade issues either.
Command line sensors, REST sensors, some types of virtual sensors, groups (I think), there's a lot of stuff you still can't do in the GUI, and even if you don't mind writing their stupid YAML-based config, the documentation isn't very friendly and in places outdated and contradicting itself.
AFAIK you still need to do everything else in yaml tho.