Just wondering why anyone would go through the hassle of installing home assistant on Linux when the fantastic hassOS exists which will run perfectly virtualized.
The OS is the path of least resistance and gives you the best experience for low maintenance.
https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=hao...
It's still running a second kernel and entire userspace stack. In my world that's not "very little overhead".
Having said that, I think if you prefer traditional distro packaging, you should absolutely stick to that.
I'm aware of the tradeoffs here. For home assistant specifically, there's two options if you want to stay on the path of first-class support. Run it bare metal or in a VM.
Going a different path isn't a bad choice, or even a big downgrade.
I had fun with all the different ways of running home assistant 6+ years ago, and then decided to embrace a solution that required the least fuss and would hold up long term. I'm happy with my choice, and it gave me exactly what I was expecting.
It's not hard to run HA in unsupported mode. The only real difference is an annoying reminder that you're unsupported. Everything else works, including plugins/add-ons.
I've run HA a bunch of ways. It doesn't really matter all that much. Use HACS to fill any gaps.
Of course you don't have to go the proxmox route, but it is an easy route.
I have a proxmox cluster, so moving things between machines, high availability, and backups are a breeze. Had an SSD go bad a few months ago, and I just moved everything on that machine to another node until the new drive showed up. It was a pleasant experience.
There's plenty of other ways to achieve this, but this is what I chose and I'm happy with it. It's simple, and I can manage everything from my phone if needed.
This. If I have to trust some huge container or custom OS where is the benefit of open source?
That is a very subjective opinion.
As was already mentioned, people rarely want to run a dedicated physical server for just a single purpose. The concept of Home Assistant Operating System requires exactly that.
Also, it is Debian-based. It uses the `apt` package manager which is slow. Some people may prefer something faster and more modern, like `pacman` or `dnf`.
> run perfectly virtualized
Fair enough.
But that obviously requires virtualization being set up on the server. If people do not use virtualization for anything else on their server, they may as well set up Home Assistant directly.
Finally, I think there is one more issue.
Many of the integrations which are possible with Home Assistant Operating System require physical hardware being connected to that server. A reader, a receiver, something like that.
But these home servers are often placed in some inaccessible locations, like an attic, where the data from sensors is unavailable. It may be impractical to run cables there. And the wireless devices may be too far away for a receiver located there to be able to read them.
So people need to come up with work-arounds to get their data to their server. They set up various signal proxies and thin clients which receive the data from the sensors on the spot where they are available and then send them over network to the Home Assistant server.
Unfortunately, from my experience, many integrations completely ignore this usecase. They are likely focusing on a happy path where everything is connected locally to "the one" server. And only then they behave nicely and work out of the box. But as soon as you need any special step or behavior, it is necessary to dig deeper and create custom layers to transport the data from your devices to the server.
Home Assistant Operating System does not make any of that simpler. Perhaps on the contrary, it forces you to use a specific Debian-based distribution with possibly outdated packages that you cannot easily upgrade without breaking Home Assistant.
Which is why it makes little sense to bother with it, in my opinion, for these kind of installations.
Do people really care if it takes 5 seconds to parse a package index vs 1? I don't get this argument at all.
And that's even before you realise it's based on fiction:
> Home Assistant Operating System is not based on a regular Linux distribution like Ubuntu.
https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system
There is no apt or any other package manager on HAOS.
Home Assistant Operating System uses Buildroot which uses Docker to run container with Home Assistant Supervisor. And only that container is Debian-based [0].
[0] https://github.com/home-assistant/operating-system/blob/0c75...
Sure a one-time wait of 12s doesn't change my life. But I won't use apt/apk _once_; I'll use it every single time that I install something. It low-key bothers me when my flow is interrupted by having to wait for machines to do their job, increasing that by 300% doesn't help.
This wouldn't be a deciding factor for me. But it doesn't add points for the Debian-based approach.
I suppose it depends. I do care because I typically need to do it regularly. And it is nice to have it done quickly.