First and foremost, I want to express my appreciation for Home Assistant and the incredible work that goes into it. It’s an amazing project that has completely changed the way I approach home automation. The fact that so much of it is developed and maintained by a community of passionate volunteers makes it all the more impressive.
That said, I wanted to share some thoughts on a challenge I recently encountered while setting up Home Assistant on an old PC—something I imagine many others may run into as well.
My setup is straightforward: I installed Home Assistant OS on an SSD and wanted to use a second internal hard drive (a larger mechanical drive) for media storage. However, I quickly discovered that Home Assistant OS does not natively support mounting a second internal drive. While there are some workarounds, they are quite hacky—requiring SSH access, modifications to system files, and dealing with potential breakages on updates. This level of complexity feels unnecessary for what should be a fairly basic use case.
Naturally, the alternative is to use a Supervised install on Debian, which provides the flexibility needed for setups like this while still retaining the Home Assistant Supervisor and add-ons. However, over time, it seems that Supervised installs have been made increasingly difficult to use. For instance, I recently performed a clean install of Debian, followed the official Supervised install instructions to the letter, and before I had even started using Home Assistant, I received a system health warning that blocked backup execution due to the system being “unhealthy.”
I completely understand the goal of ensuring stability, and I respect the developers’ desire to maintain a reliable, well-supported experience. However, the current situation creates a bit of a dilemma. Home Assistant OS is fairly locked down and best suited for simple, appliance-like installations. But at the same time, Supervised—which offers the flexibility needed for more advanced configurations—is becoming harder to use. This means that users who need more control are left with only two options: either work around the limitations of Home Assistant OS with unofficial and potentially fragile modifications, or move to a completely containerized setup, which is actually more complex than using Supervised.
I’m not suggesting that Home Assistant OS should become as open as a traditional Linux distribution, nor am I arguing that Supervised should be the primary install method. But given that Home Assistant OS is intentionally limited in flexibility, it seems reasonable that Supervised should remain a legitimate, fully supported alternative—especially for those running Home Assistant on repurposed hardware.
Again, I’m incredibly grateful for everything the Home Assistant developers and community contributors do. I just wanted to share this perspective in the hopes that it might help inform future decisions around installation methods and system flexibility. Thanks to everyone involved for all the amazing work!