I moved my Zigbee coordinator off a Raspberry Pi after a year and everything got better

After a year of reliability issues running Home Assistant with a SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB dongle on a Raspberry Pi 4, the author migrated the entire setup to an x86 mini PC (HP ProDesk 600 G6 running Proxmox). The migration took under an hour using Home Assistant's built-in backup and restore. The result was dramatically improved: automations trigger instantly, Zigbee devices stay connected without extension cables, ESPHome firmware compilation is faster, and Home Assistant hasn't needed a manual restart in three months. The conclusion is that a Raspberry Pi works for small starter setups but struggles as a smart home scales.