Heyho,
I am an absolutely beginner when it comes to Smart Homes, but have some knowledge when it comes to coding, Linux, Docker and Co.
So, I decided to make my home smart and bought some stuff and hopefully I am now able to connect it somehow, but I am missing a good explanation/tutorial.
If I understand correctly then I should install some software on my minipc, connect it to my ZBT-2 which then form a Matter Controller which then can be somehow connected to the Matter lightbulbs. Is that general notion correct or am I already off? If it is correct, does anyone know a good tutorial for it? When I try to google Matter Controller I often find ready made ones and nothing on how to set it up on my own.
I bought the MiniPC because I want to set up a small home server, too, but that is largely unrelated.


If you’re starting HAOS is the way to go. It’s really effortless and I’m considering to switch back to it from Kubernetes
I recommend this too. I’m using kubernetes for other stuff, but HAOS for Home Assistant. Super easy to manage. And it works great on small, appliance machines (I’m using Home Assistant Green).
That’s the route I took. I still pray for a nice Home Assistant helm chart because I’d really like to be able to quickly bounce a Home Assistant container around between nodes and also have easier monitoring and alerting, but all the k8s options just seemed too jank.
Yes, but then I had to setup Multus to have Home Assistant have an interface on my LAN (i.e. for HomeKit) and it’s added complexity at that point
If I would use HAOS as my real OS (so not as an image for a container), that would limit my capabilities of running other services, wouldn’t it? Sounds better to have HA containerized. I found this tutorial: https://sascha-brockel.de/en/set-up-thread-matter-in-home-assistant-with-docker/
If you plan to run other stuff, I’d rather recommend using HAOS in a VM, possibly on Proxmox VE.
If you decide to install HA as container on any other host, then you will have to install any other component/plugin/etc as external containers or services as needed. HAOS has everything included.
Especially true if you want to play around with Matter and Thread
Just use Proxmox to install HAOS as a VM