After months and months of everything working fine with HA on Linux I have run into a problem that seems to be unfixable. Yes, I have made a post about it and people have tried to help but it seems hopeless.
So my next thing to try is to start over from scratch but this time it might behoove me to use Windows as the host OS as I understand it 10,000 times better than I do Linux.
Luckily I dont have to take the current one “down” before I do this as I am using a Surface Pro 3 with Debian at the moment and I have another Surface Pro 3 with a fresh, clean install of Win10 (too old/slow for Win11).
I have done some Googling and still have not found any advice that was not immediately contradicted in the comments of the blog/vlog/video.
I was hoping for some insight here as to things I might try and avoid or anything helpful, really, before I start going down this path.
Thanks so much for reading and I open to almost all advice as I am a bit of a noob
You’re in for a world of issues trying to run this on windows. Most people who run HA on windows will run it in WSL2, which is virtual machine running linux. Or they run docker, which requires WSL.
As a person who primarily uses windows at all times for work, I suggest you just learn linux. It’s not as far off from windows as you think it is. If you’re familiar with CMD in windows, you can pick up linux in no time. It’s just commands.
The other thing I do to reduce my linux use are:
Set up SSH using the custom SSH addon so that you can SCP files to and from the OS running home assistant. Keep in mind that you can screw things up, but if you like to look without touching, go for it. You can use WinSCP to view the entire os folder structure on a windows machine. All through SSH.
Set up samba so that you can map a network drive on a windows machine and use your windows computer to do all ‘yaml’. This only gives you access to the config folder, which is why you might like point 1.
Just learn to google linux. Everything is a command line command, and it’s super simple if you just read the command documents. They are well documented. As a non-linux person, I can safely navigate most issues that come up. When I can’t, I ask here or on linux forums.
JUST to explain some differences… that I recently ran into:
Numpy is a library used by a large number of integrations. I use this library a lot in windows. The library is highly dependent on OS and oddly enough, what processor you use. You may get different results for integrations that use this library when going from linux to windows. I had to scrap using numpy for a complex math problem I was doing at work because it just gave me the wrong result on windows. Linux, the result was correct. Turns out, I had to go and find a special version of numpy that works with intel chips on a windows machine to get the correct result every time.
Now that’s just 1 library. Anything that speaks with the OS will have issues like this, which is a large number of python libraries.
Another that comes to mind is date & time formatting. %-I does not work on windows, so you can’t ever make a time that displays “8:00 AM”, the best you can do is “08:00 AM”.
Just my personal opinion, but it’s far easier and less frustrating to learn the minimum required Linux skills than it is to fight the ever-changing and undocumented pitfalls of Microsoft Windows.
My entire IT career has been based on Microsoft Windows in some way shape or form.
I run mine in Linux.
Heed what @Petro says here. You’re looking for a world of hurt if you go that path.
Im not saying anything is inherently wrong with Windows (I will not enter into a religious war between OSs in this thread) but simply it’s a case of user testing. Your sample size on windows is miniscule.
Your use case is what HAOS is built for. Spin it up in a VM if you have to use your Windows box.
Every OS has it’s purpose in life, that’s why the war is never going to end as everyone is mostly right about their points and thats okay
That being said, I do believe that Linux is the best footing/foundation for HA. Hands down but I fear if I just redo everything on a new version of Linux I will be right back where I started with a borked system that I (and even a few Linux pros) are unable to fix (so far, anyway).
I still agree that Linux is the best for this and as a 50 yr old DOS lover (who rejected Windows and their “cute little icons” until Win95 forced me to quit being a snobby ass and just get over myself) I do like a nice clean CLI. Knowing DOS the way I do learning the basics of the syntax is not an issue I just need to understand the structure and configuration better.
Again, y’all are all correct tho. Thank you for straightening me out… unfortunately I am still FUBAR
What route did you go? If you went supervised, then don’t do that. There’s nothing you need supervised for at this point if you’re a beginner. Go that route when you become an expert. Go HassOS.
I see beginners going supervised every day on discord because they see “You can run other stuff too”. But the reality is, supervised is for experts. I’m running supervised and I probably shouldn’t be as I’m not an expert in linux.
EDIT: Looking at your post history, it’s not clear what installation route you went. But it sure does look like you went with supervised because you’re talking about touching the OS while you also have access to addons. Supervised is the only route that typically can do that.
So… don’t go supervised. Install HassOS and let HassOS manage your OS so that you don’t have to bork yourself.
From my understanding HAOS + Surface Pro 3 = A quick trip to Borkville (and not in the good way). Matter of fact I used to run HAOS and I think it was the fact that we hard to run Debian to get all hardware to work that made us go this way. And yes, I run an Unsupported Supervised install
Not gonna lie, things were great for a long time. Debbie (what I named my Debian install, because of course) was kicking ass for many months and life was great. That being, I dont mind throwing HAOS on this other Surface and trying it out. Oh wait… this other Surface might eb the one I cant get into BIOS to disable stuff so that I can install HAOS… hmmmm. Will have to investigate
Yeah I bet you had issues. The surface was purpose built to run Windows on bare metal. Anythng else. Eep. (Note I say this typing on my Surface Pro 6- I’ve owned at least one of every model since the RT)
On that box run Windows for the bare OS (driver issues etc as you alluded to) then run HAOS inside a VM. But you’re still eventually going to run into battery issues on that machine - probably within 6 months of 24x7. It’ll be ok for now but plan on a better long term rig.
You should be able to reinstall windows on that surface and the license that’s attached to the bios should pick right back up too. Then use that as your access machine to HA, which will run headless.
Cant argue with that but when I got so many of them and they are not being used and cant be resold due to company policy… it would be nice to have my HA be an all in one with built in touch screen for local controls. But all that does not negate your point that I can buy/find/build another and move off the Surface
you will find you want it headless because the dashboard needs ot be somewhere else. After you hang a usb hub and all your various coordinator sticks off it you won’t be picking this box up and using it like a tablet anymore.
