With a new ownership structure, Home Assistant is making its next big move
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.
There are a few add-ons that are very handy that don't have a docker equivalent. Namely the google cloud backup.
I also agree that you generally don't need add-ons and hopefully if someone is running HA on docker, they don't need them, but for a few select ones, it is "needed"
No it's true. I run ha in a docker container too, and it doesn't support the plugin supervisor at all. You have to spin up your own plugin containers manually and configure the connection to them in the core ha instance, that's what I did with piper/wyoming. I'd be happy to share a compose file if someone wants it.
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.