I have no problem with them offering a ready-to-run hardware solution for Home Assistant, but I am annoyed that it's probably a motivating factor for why there isn't a self-installing image for HA on BYO hardware...
you mean an image like this?
This is what I've been running on my generic x86-64 system for a couple of years now, 0 issues. Even migrated to a newer system recently because I wanted something that was slightly faster for ESPHome compilations.
I mean... That is how a lot of OSes are distributed: by giving you an ISO that you burn onto a USB dongle to install.
> In my case I used an Ubuntu livecd to download and write the image to the machine.
So... Same thing?
The HAOS ISO cannot install itself onto a machine. That is my minor complaint.