Functionality Differences between HA OS and HASS.io?

My setup has been primarily Ubuntu with Hass.io running in docker per that good ole script that we used to be able to run.

But, since this is an unsupported configuration (which translates to “more volatile for my sanity”) I’m going to give Proxmox a shot.

What I’m wondering is if there are any major differences between how each is managed.

At present, I’ve built quite a few processes outside of HA that utilize the /usr/share/hassio/homeassistant path as a destination or source (cron jobs, backups, etc.)

Is there a comparison chart anywhere?

What you are describing is called Home Assistant Supervised and there is also Home Assistant Container. Both are supported.

Personally speaking I prefer HAS. You get a full OS and a fully supervised HA. This is a pretty simple install:

  • Install basic Ubuntu server eg minimal 18.04 and upgrade to 20.04 (do-dist-upgrade -d)
  • Install docker-ce or docker-io (its the same at the moment on Ubuntu 20.04)
# apt install apparmor-utils apt-transport-https avahi-daemon ca-certificates curl dbus jq socat software-properties-common
# curl -sL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/home-assistant/supervised-installer/master/installer.sh" | bash -s
  • Point your browser at the system on port 8123 and watch journalctl -f at the commandline

Those notes are scraped straight off my corp. wiki. I run quite a few of these beasts.

Just getting access to @frenck 's add ons is a massive boon. Do you really want to install Grafana, InfluxDB and all that stuff by hand? If you get DNS sorted and use an nginx addon, you get Lets Encrypt for free too. I used to do RabbitMQ for MQTT but now the add on for Mosquitto does pretty much everything I used to use Rabbit for and with the auth hook up, accounts are easy to manage.

I am a control freak unix sysadmin with about 25 years experience. In my view, HA Supervised is the dog’s nadgers. However if you are only deploying on a little box - Odroid or RPi then Home Assistant OS is your man. I use rather more hardware but now that SSDs are available on RPis with 8GB of RAM with pretty decent quad cores and 1GB NICs, I may change my mind again soon!