[On Hold] Deprecating Home Assistant Supervised on generic Linux

Blog
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May 26

New blog post published with next steps

May 10: Decision put on hold

We’ve been overwhelmed with the many reactions. We realize our communication has been poor on this subject, for which I want to apologize. We do not collect data and so can’t always judge the impact of our decisions.

We’re going to put the deprecation plan on hold for now. Anyone running this installation method today can continue running this. We will offer more clear information in the future.

We’re going to investigate how we can maintain the supervised installation on generic Linux.

Furthermore, we are going to make sure that supported installation guides are properly documented.

– Paulus

TL;DR: Home Assistant Supervised (also known as Home Assistant on Generic Linux) installation method is no longer supported.

There are currently three different ways of installing Home Assistant:

  • Home Assistant: our operating system running either directly on a supported device like the ODROID N2, Raspberry Pi 4, Intel NUC or a virtual machine.
  • Home Assistant Supervised: an installation of core + supervisor that are hosted on a generic Linux installation.
  • Home Assistant Core: our Python core application running in a Python virtual environment or a Docker container.
![](upload://awvLB4BT8J2wcRERkGhmXkgmwvR.png)

The benefit of running the Supervisor is that you are able to keep Home Assistant up to date from within Home Assistant, and easily install add-ons that are pre-configured to be able to integrate with Home Assistant.

The Supervisor is an extremely complicated program that interacts with a wide range of applications and components in the host operating system. Examples are Docker containers, DNS, sound and USB hardware sticks that users want to use with Home Assistant. The Supervisor is controlled from Home Assistant which allows us to create a full home automation hub experience.

The Home Assistant operating system is made with the bare minimum that the Supervisor needs to run and makes sure it does not get in the way of the Supervisor: the system is fully managed by the Supervisor.

Some users still wanted to be able to control the host operating system, and so a generic installer was introduced that could install Home Assistant Core and Supervisor on a generic Linux system, like Debian or Ubuntu.

However, when people run it on top of their own system, things can go wrong. And in fact, it’s quite complex to maintain it on generic Linux. Installing is fine, everyone can follow a tutorial, but after that when things break, people come to us, not the author of the tutorial. And this workload keeps growing, to a problematic extent.

Home Assistant OS and Supervisor are being maintained by Pascal. He started them 3,5 years ago and has been maintaining this first in his spare time, later as a full-time employee of Nabu Casa.

Building the operating system and the supervisor is a complex task that requires specific expertise. Sadly after 3,5 years, there are still no other contributors to help. This has resulted in his responsibilities outgrowing what one can expect from a full-time employee.

Nabu Casa was founded to make the development of Home Assistant sustainable. To be able to maintain a healthy work/life balance and to avoid developer burn-out that is, unfortunately, common in the open source world.

In an effort to reduce Pascal’s constraints we’re per direct no longer supporting the generic Linux installation method. It will no longer be mentioned in the documentation. We have archived the repository. If you are willing to maintain it, feel free to fork it. Issues that result from using this will be ignored or closed when reported to us.

Open Source & Community

Just as with our recent decision to limit the usage of YAML in some cases, Home Assistant will keep choosing health over features. Open source is not about us having to support every feature anyone on the internet can think of. Open source means that anyone can do that themselves and choose to share this or not.

There are still tons of ways of installing Home Assistant, there are still tons of features and customizations possible.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I run Home Assistant while still keeping control over the operating system?

We offer a virtual machine image of Home Assistant. These images can be used on e.g., VMWare, VirtualBox and Proxmox, and also on NAS systems that support running a VM as most modern NAS systems do. Using these provided images will give you the full supported Home Assistant experience.

You can find virtual machine images here.

I run on a platform that doesn’t support VMs and I still want to keep control over the operating system.

To do this we recommend running Home Assistant Core in Docker. You will lose out on the easy updates, system management and pre-configured apps (add-ons) from the UI. However, you are still able to run the full beating heart of the Home Assistant home automation platform.

All applications that are available as Home Assistant add-ons are also available as third-party Docker containers. You will be responsible to configure them to work with Home Assistant Core yourself.

I know what I am doing. Can I still use the generic Linux installer?

Yep, the archived repository is still there. You can also fork it and change things. But there is no official resource to visit when things break.

I am currently running Home Assistant Supervised. Now what?

Everything will continue to work as-is. Bugs won’t be fixed and you should consider migrating to one of the other methods. If you are migrating to a virtual machine, you can make a snapshot in the Supervisor panel and restore that in your new installation.

[Edit May 9, 16:19] Removed paragraph from Open Source & Community as it was insinuating.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/05/09/deprecating-home-assistant-supervised-on-generic-linux/
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Where is the official resource if things break on “Home Assistant” version?

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Depending on where it breaks, we’re having issue trackers for frontend, core, supervisor and operating system.

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Thanks for clarifying this stuff. Sometimes there really is too much choice. I want software that just works, and I think Home Assistant has the right vision to eventually get there. Thanks for your great work!

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Ok, read it. I think the topic can now be closed because there is no point in discussing it anyway.

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Ha ha! The joke’s on me. I just switched my production server to Home Assistant Supervised and now it’s discontinued. Talk about unfortunate timing.

I’m not angry, just disappointed. I now have to rethink the hardware platform I’m using.

As a side-note, it was adequate to justify the decision solely on the basis of insufficient resources. Many of us have or had careers in business, engineering, science, etc and accept that reason. The added bit about affecting people’s health was unnecessary. Whether it’s true or not isn’t the issue; it comes across as harvesting pathos.

We discontinued Supervised because for each installed instance, god killed a puppy. We can’t live with that guilt anymore.

Anyway, on to explore virtual machines …

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OK… just for clarification, is the NuC image compatible with a generic x86_64 machine (an atom CPU)?
I use some CLI commands on my Ubuntu (where HA and supervisor are running) to retrieve some values from system and external sites and publish on Mqtt (Mqtt addon)… would it be possible to migrate them? IOW, will I loose such feature? do I need another Linux machine up and running?
will my conbee2 USB dongle work?
and what about the USB dvb dongle I use to retrieve data from a 433 device?
moved from a raspy3 to an atom fanless thin client with 4 GB ram and ssd… I don’t want to move back to raspy.
TIA

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Which one of the ‘official images’ is the one that can be used to create a proxmox vm please? And can it be marked as such on the page?

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I know you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do and the decision has been made, but can I respectfully suggest you give a little bit of notice for changes like this? Announcing that from (say) 0.111 this method would no longer would be supported would have given people with this configuration a chance to look at alternatives but still get support in the meantime.

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Why? It’s not like the users of HA matter.

Did anyone even think to ask how many users actually use this before the decision was made?

Maybe it would have been better to stop supporting those other install platforms instead of the generic Linux install.

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I read this with dismay, then re-read it and now I am more concerned about Pascal. All the best to him.

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The way these decisions are being communicated is troublesome. I have maintained and contributed to a number of open source projects over the years and absolutely understand the entitled attitude of some users. Of course I do not expect someone to sacrifice their health for work or a hobby, and I suspect MOST people do not. Implying that the people who are upset by this decision are only those sorts of people is disingenuous.

I am upset at the poorly coordinated and poorly communicated decisions being made lately with no input from the community.

Why did it get so bad that the maintainers felt they had choose between their health and work? That should have been communicated earlier to the community, along with a call for assistance or for someone to take over the maintenance, not removing documentation and pulling features without an announcement.

In an open source project, the first step should always be communication. Open source is hard work. I think the maintainers need to re-evaluate if they indeed do want to be open source, and to communicate that as soon as possible, and I think users need to reevaluate their options.

Edit in response to the updated post: Thank you for reconsidering this position and planning to address deprecation more carefully in the future. This is how healthy OSS communities work!

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If there is an issue there then I think we can all agree to that.

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Not just you. I just installed HA Supervised as a “toe in the water” toward again possibly moving my production system in that direction. (that and I wanted the NUT UPS add-on because I couldn’t figure out how to get any other docker solution to work for me for some reason)

This happened last time I ventured in that direction when the auto supervisor update silently broke everyone’s installs.

I guess I’ll just stick with my Core install in docker and be done with it.

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Hey there, in case I want to remove this from my OS, how i should do this? To delete all dockers for example from portainer is enough? I’m linux newbie.

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The irony is that I started with Core/venv, then Core/docker-compose (for my test system) and then chose to try Home Assistant Supervised/Ubuntu for my new production system. It was a complete ‘clean sheet’ installation and I liked what I saw (except the part where everything runs as root). I made the switch just days ago and now I’m running a discontinued production system. :man_facepalming:

The hardware I’m using is an old laptop. It’s more than capable of handling Supervised (on Ubuntu). However, switching it to run, say, Proxmox is a pile of work (and a second drive is required) just to run a supported virtual instance of Home Assistant.

I originally planned to move from venv to docker-compose but ‘drank the koolaid’ and tried Home Assistant Supervised (on Ubuntu). It appears I will be reverting to my original decision and switching everything to docker-compose. It’s far more ‘installation experience’ than I bargained for. :man_shrugging:

EDIT

I was misled by the installation videos I watched and two users have confirmed that a second drive is not mandatory.

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I set this up on ESXi by using the VMDK file earlier today.
When setting it up it suggested 6GB for the disk, but there was no issues setting that to 60GB

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You were expected to allocate more space before starting the image. But even better, it now expands to any space allocated after the fact. This was added in 3.8 or so.

dammit ludeeus

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