The new Home Assistant desktop installer got a second way to set up a generic x86-64 computer. Alpha 4, published on 23 October 2026 at 18:27 Polish time, includes a live USB route: the app prepares a stick on your everyday computer, you boot the mini PC from it, and the stick writes Home Assistant OS to the PC's internal disk. The target PC needs no network connection during the install. The computer that builds the stick does need internet access to download the images.
What it replaces
The current guide for generic x86-64 says plainly that Home Assistant OS has no installer of its own. The recommended method is to boot Ubuntu from a USB stick, connect it to the internet, download the image and write it to the internal disk with the Disks app. The other method is to take the disk out and write it on another computer through an adapter. The new installer adds an "I need to boot from USB" option to its mini PC flow and replaces that step with a stick it builds itself.
How it works
You choose one of two outputs. For a USB stick (2 GB or more, and it will be erased), the app downloads the official Alpine Linux ISO, pinned to version 3.24.2, and the latest stable Home Assistant OS image for generic x86-64. It checks both checksums and writes the stick. Alternatively it saves a bootable ISO file, for a virtual machine or for a tool like Rufus. On Windows, writing a stick needs administrator rights, and the app offers to restart itself with them. Saving an ISO never does.
On the PC, the stick runs a small program called hai-live. Since a follow-up pull request from Franck Nijhof it has a full-screen interface in the style of the desktop installer. You pick the target disk with the arrow keys, and the list refreshes every two seconds, so a disk connected later shows up on its own. To erase the disk you have to type erase. Right before writing, the program checks again that the disk is the one you picked, comparing its name, model, size and serial number, and if anything changed it writes nothing. A progress bar shows the time left, and the last screen tells you to remove the stick, restart and open http://homeassistant.local.
Requirements and limits
The PC has to boot the stick in UEFI mode with Secure Boot off and SATA set to AHCI, not RAID or Intel RST. Legacy BIOS is not supported, because Home Assistant OS needs UEFI anyway.
The author, Ashley Abbott, calls it a proof of concept. It has been tested on a Dell OptiPlex 3020M with a SATA SSD, where the install took about two minutes, and in Proxmox and other virtual machines. Installing to NVMe and eMMC disks has not been tried on real hardware yet, and neither has writing a stick from macOS, where only the ISO route was tested. The author asks for reports from more PCs, especially newer ones.
The installer is still an alpha and is not signed on Windows, so SmartScreen may warn about an unknown publisher.