Hass Vs hass.io Vs hassOS

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I think there’s a lot of confusion between the different installations possible, especially hassio and hassos.

I can’t tell what the difference is between hassio and Hassos. From what I can tell hassio = Hassos + Hass

But some people are saying to go with hassio rather than Hassos

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Hassos is a full OS that you will install on a compatible hardware. Hassio is a container installation that you run on the OS of your choice.
Your question is only about this difference or you are asking because you want to do the choice between both ?
The main difference is that with hassos the hardware you will use to run it will be only dedicated to hassos. With hassio you will be able to run anything else more on the OS you choose (windows/Mac/Linux distribution).

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Thanks. That’s what most people say, though that’s not what this page says

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Ok I did not explained it 100% correct.
Hassio is a part of hassos that you can run on any OS of your choice. But hassos (embedding hassio) will require 100% of your piece of hardware dedicated to home assistant.

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Although I’m running Hassos in virtualbox

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I’ll try:

Home Assistant is a python application to automate your house. It is probably best installed on linux, but apparently also works on windows and OSX.

Hassio is a dockerised version of home assistant, plus a dockerised supervisor. It can be installed on any linux, I am not sure about OSX and windows. It also has the facility to to run hassio addons, which are separate applications like a dhcp server, a mosquitto server - pretty well anything you can put in docker can be made into an addon.

Hassos is a stripped down linux operating system designed just to run hassio (plus those addons of course).

To complicate matters further, you can also run home assistant virtual machines like virtualbox. This can be done a number of ways:

  1. Run a VM and install a linux OS, then install ha as you would in a computer running linux as it’s host OS.

  2. Run a VM and install a linux OS, then install hassio as you would on a linux box.

  3. Run a VM and install hassos as a VM.

I wouldn’t recommend the VM route, unless you really absolutely only have one computer in your house and you need it to run windows as the host OS.

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Thanks. Thats starting to make sense.
Id much rather hassos installed on my machine but it just doesnt work. would not boot at all.
Also the plex plugin cannot mount my media on a separate drive from Hass.

So went for the vm.
lubuntu> virtualbox > hassos
Lubuntu> Plex server

The issue i have is on a power failure the vm doesnt always start back up and i have to unplug and replug the zigbee stick then reboot hass anyway.

It sounds like I’d be better off installing hassio straight into lubuntu,
I could not find any instructions for this
How does one go about it?
Can I still install add-ons like deconz, esphome etc?
Will it start up on boot?
Sorry for all the questions

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Thanks, I saw that but got confused as saw the VM instructions on same page.
I’ll give that a try this evening.

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All up and running and migrated my config.
The only hitch I had was deconz. The container didn’t set up properly. So had to uninstall and reinstall then restore my phoscon backup.
Pretty simple really. Not sure why it’s considered advanced users only.
Is so much faster than it was in virtualbox! A reboot was taking over a minute, now under 5 seconds.

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A couple of points in favour of a VM configuration:

  1. Isolation of Home Assistant from any other software dependencies / interactions - I’m running a dedicated VM which only hosts Home Assistant so I can guarantee (as far as possible) that my home automation setup will be running all the time. I could do this with a dedicated piece of hardware, but that brings me to point 2.
  2. Ease of back up - I regularly snapshot my Home Assistant VM to a separate storage device so I can recover very quickly in the event of the VM hardware failing.
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Yep, good reasoning, and good contribution.

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I’m not so sure that’s any truer than for docker.
After all whichever virtualbox or VMware platform you’re running will still have those dependency or interaction issues, albeit maybe less. Definitely more issues with usb pass through etc.
Snapshots is a good thing but hassio also does that.

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I am trying to get my head around Hass.io vs a HA installation with Hassbian or directly on Debian/Rapbian on a Raspberry PI.

Is it possible to install packages from Github in Hassio? Or is it only possible to use the available add-ons? If so, I will have to go for a new installation as I want to include packages that does not exist as add-ons. And if I have to go that way, is it possible to copy the configuration from Hassio and import it to HA on the new installation?

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packages of what?

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is there any difference in speed, reaction time, etc between them?

Im running Hass.io on a SSD but if Hassos is at bottomline faster then maybe I will switch.
Every improvement to make the whole automation faster will be great.

RPi4, 4 GB Board with SD (Boot) and SSD (Root)

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No is the short answer.

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