How much trouble and what might I lose if I change the OS?

Installation
1

Hello, dear readers! Thanks for taking the time to read this and I hope y’all can straighten me out, as I am a long time HA user but still very noob-like, bordering on the moronic.

I am trying to game something out and your input is very valuable to me.

For years I have run HAOS on a Pi 4 (2Gb w/ 128Gb mSD card). As I dont do a ton with HA, just some lights, sensors, switches and home energy monitor even the Pi 4 was overkill, but it worked great so I was happy.

I recently was gifted an 8Gb Pi 5 w/ NVMe M.2 hat and a 256Gb drive. It has a 10.1 screen/case combo with it. I installed a fresh OS and uploaded a fresh back up, easy peasy and all is well. However, I feel it is even more overkill and the screen is mostly useless unless I need terminal access while at the unit.

So the question I am trying to solve is: How much work would it be for me to start over on the Pi 5 and install Ubuntu on it and then put a VM or Docker with HA on it. Will I have to set everything back up again in HA and will even lose access to some official Addons and HACS too?

I have minimal Linux experience but have installed and used Ubuntu a few times, plus I am comfortable with CLIs as I grew up with CPM & MSDOS/PCDOS.

Anyway, thanks for reading and am looking forward to y’all’s thoughts and feedback.

2

You can run HAOS inside Proxmox as a VM.

Build Proxmox.
Create vm
Do appropriate hardware pass through for your usb etc.
Install HAOS into the vm
Boot it, and restore your latest backup.

1 Like
3

Ubuntu with a QEMU or variant would work too.
HA runs pretty well as a VM inside that, because it comes mes with QEMU guest utilities installed.
(Proxmox is using QEMU too, but the OS is tailored to being a pure hypervisor server).

2 Likes