[On Hold] Deprecating Home Assistant Supervised on generic Linux

[petro]

@roussell

BTW, “(un)supported” is the wrong word to use in this context.

It’s unsupported by the install scripts. That’s the context, I’m not sure there is a better word.

@baz123

IME offering help gets thrown back in your face with a “we don’t want to discuss this - closed”.

Some things are not up for discussion.

This on the other hand is probably something that could be negotiated in the correct channels. If you want this to change, write up an issue. Or create a what the heck before the month runs out. TBH I don’t think anyone is adamant that this stays a critical error. That’s just what it was made. It’s critical information to correctly installed supervisors. Based on that logic, it makes sense to make it red. Sometimes you guys need to put yourselves in others shoes. It’s not just about you. I’ve said this 3 or 4 times in this thread. The error message helped me fix my installation. Had it been buried, I would have not seen it or noticed that I had out of date packages. I don’t touch the OS often, how am I supposed to know?

[roussell (Terry Roussell)]

@petro

@roussell

BTW, “(un)supported” is the wrong word to use in this context.

It’s unsupported by the install scripts. That’s the context, I’m not sure there is a better word.

Well, not true because:

1. If you get to the point of seeing the error message in the supervisor screen… The Install script worked.

2. I installed it on Ubuntu using the install script (before it was removed/hidden) and it worked just fine. Like with ANY Linux install, I reviewed and installed the pre-requisites, then ran the script. Done. That simple. If it is no longer supported by the install script, it’s because the script is doing specific checks for silly violations that have no bearing on the outcome.

EDIT: They can call it, color it, place it where ever they want, just give us an “Acknowledge” button to accept liability and make it go away.

Terry

[francisp (Francis)]

Totally off-topic, but

@petro

Had it been buried, I would have not seen it or noticed that I had out of date packages. I don’t touch the OS often, how am I supposed to know?

if you run supervised, it is your responsibility to keep the OS up-to-date. It is not a big work to run every three weeks, before you upgrade HA, to do a

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y

[petro]

Yes, I know. Was just giving my personal experience.

@roussell

Well, not true because:

1. If you get to the point of seeing the error message in the supervisor screen… The Install script worked.
2. I installed it on Ubuntu using the install script (before it was removed/hidden) and it worked just fine. Like with ANY Linux install, I reviewed and installed the pre-requisites, then ran the script. Done. That simple. If it is no longer supported by the install script, it’s because the script is doing specific checks for silly violations that have no bearing on the outcome.

Terry

It is true because that’s the intent. It’s only tested against Debian. This is what they mean by not supported. If you run into issues installing, they aren’t going to make changes to the script to fix it. Only if it’s Debian.

[roussell (Terry Roussell)]

@petro

It is true because that’s the intent. It’s only tested against Debian. This is what they mean by not supported. If you run into issues installing, they aren’t going to make changes to the script to fix it. Only if it’s Debian.

Then “Unrecommended” still fits. “Support” implies help to correct a situation from the “company” producing the product. I’d wager that most support is handled by other users, not the core dev team (which is the way it should be). At any rate, debates over wording is irrelevant. Give those of us who know what we’re doing a way to permanently dismiss the false error and a lot of the civil unrest (for this issue) will go away.

Terry

[roussell (Terry Roussell)]

@roussell

Give those of us who know what we’re doing a way to permanently dismiss the false error and a lot of the civil unrest (for this issue) will go away.

And now it’s a WTH! - Please Vote!

WTH! "Acknowledge" button for "Unsupported OS" messages

Regardless of the intent of the Devs. There should be some type of “Acknowledge” button that we can click to make those annoying Unsupported OS (or equivalent) messages go away - permanently. Just because there are those of us willing to accept the risks of going against the fray and managing our own OS install, we shouldn’t be subjected to permanent messages accusing us of doing it wrong. Terry

Terry

[finity]

@petro

There’s only been 3 “hot” issues.

Those are only the most recent three. There have more than that over the last few years I’ve been here.

@petro

2 of which were reversed

Which two were reversed in that list? I only know of one and that is the topic of this thread.

And this one only got reversed because of the sheer overwhelming sea of backlash and because it was right on the heels of the last “hot issue” it couldn’t easily be swept under the rug

@petro

you’re trying to make it a trend.

Well, I guess, all of those other people who are also seeing this as a trend are just full of $#%#%.

Again I’m not the only one.

@petro

Some Most things are not up for discussion.

There, I fixed it for you.

@petro

Sometimes you guys need to put yourselves in others shoes.

That advice can go both ways.

@petro

create a what the heck before the month runs out.

Yeah, hurry up and file your suggestions and criticism before the month is over while those are officially accepted. Anything after that will get you labelled with the “complainer” tag.

“Suggestions/criticism/complaints are only OK only if we say it’s OK and give you explicit permission. Otherwise STFU and get over it.”

Sounds just like more of the “don’t speak to me unless you’re spoken to first” mentality we see here all the time.

[kanga_who (Jason)]

@frenck

The offered documentation was incorrect (if we talk about the same person that is… cannot tell), furthermore, a PR was never created.

I’ve created a PR that (I think) complies with ADR14 to provide some more detailed instructions for a Supervised install.

I’m sure there are some things that will need to be adjusted, so happy to get some feedback on it and work with you to get the balance right.

Update README.md

[finity]

Again, I’m not the only one. I’m just not afraid to say the things others want to.

As evidenced by the flood of “WTH” requests since the section was posted (374 per week as of the last count which is more than literally every other single category here.).

Do you think that every one of those topics just suddenly materialized out of thin air in the last week? No they have been a thorn in peoples sides for a long time but they were either afraid of being called names or they knew it just wasn’t worth the time to post them just to have them ignored or immediately shot down with “don’t complain. It’s free software. What code have you contributed lately”.

And there’s a bunch with a crap load of votes (even tho I was told in this thread that polls on this forum don’t matter because they aren’t “representative” so my attempt at being helpful was brushed off). That alone tells us that there are a lot of things that a bunch of people really don’t like but are afraid to bring it up.

And THAT is the exact result of the “circle the wagons” culture promoted by those in charge.

[DavidFW1960 (David)]

Take a deep breath boys & girls…

[finity]

I think you need to look at some of the other stuff I’ve contributed here aside from the massive amount of time I spend here helping others.

I’ve submitted PR’s for documentation changes. Some were even approved. I have a custom integration and several lovelace plugins available thru HACS.

I’ve submitted many feature requests thru the appropriate forum categories. and I’ve contributed to a couple of github issues.

That said I’m going to say that you are mistaken in your statement above

Could I suggest that before throwing unfounded accusations in the future that you should try to have better information regarding the subject.

[nickrout]

Jesus man just stop it OK. You are getting repetitive, and that is an understatement.

Yes you were an active and helpful community member. Maybe you still are, but frankly most of your posts that I have seen for a while are just argumentative and frankly tedious.

Please stop.

[Silicon_Avatar]

@finity

No they have been a thorn in peoples sides for a long time but they were either afraid of being called names or they knew it just wasn’t worth the time to post them just to have them ignored or immediately shot down with “don’t complain. It’s free software.

Or just banned from Github when they file legitimate bug reports or feature requests. Of course those people are labeled as the “usual complainers” too, but where else do they have to turn?
As for free software, AFAIK this is free software that has a paid option, where the core maintainers and owners of the repo are paid employees of the organization. So while the software is still free, a few of the developers are not just “donating their spare time” but rather are paid to maintain and improve it. That throws out a lot of the usual “but their just volunteers!” discussion.

[nickrout]

A lot of people confuse free, which has two meanings. Free as in beer, and free as in speech. Home Assistant is both. Nabu Casa seems to be neither. (I haven’t seen a repo for Nabu Casa’s server software).

[finity]

@nickrout

You are getting repetitive,

Mostly only in response to other peoples repetitive and tedious posts.

@nickrout

most of your posts that I have seen for a while are just argumentative

Obviously you aren’t looking in the right place.

@nickrout

Please stop.

Nope.

If it needs to be said, I’ll say it.

If you don’t want to read it then there’s always the ignore function. (is that still a thing? I’ve never felt the need to use it.)

[jcbbas]

Boy to my dismay, I take a peek at this blog post for the first time in a while and it seems like chaos. While in general, I have supported near everything that has been done, the worry that this is a crossing point into a bad territory is there. I too have the unsupported installation message. I too also got the impression that by enabling the new data collection, that this decision would be reconsidered due to the sheer number of individuals that install HA in this manner. To hear that this information is not even being used for decisions like this is crazy to me.

I rant and rave about how great home assistant is to all my co-workers and family. In fact, my setup has them all wanting to aspire to have the same, and I know I have personally talked 2 people out of going to Samsung Smarthings in favor of HA. One of them utilizing the exact same setup I have, and will now receive the unsupported installation message.

While I tend to be mute on most of this stuff, I do feel like the community input is needed. Clearly this decision has caused a major stir, and short of undoing the decision completely, I don’t think it will end. I have paid for Nabu Casa since the release to support this project and help some of the individuals that devote a lot of time to it get paid for just that. I don’t even use any of the features as they were already setup before it was announced. I guess how I feel about a lot of this is summed up pretty well here:

@DavidFW1960

@petro

Hindsight is 20/20

There have been a LOT of infuriating major changes this last year none of which have been communicated well so it’s not hindsight as such it’s a pattern. A lot of goodwill is being pissed away for no reason - it’s no wonder people assume the worst and are suspicious.

[Silicon_Avatar]

I don’t blame them for wanting to make money from this (quite successful) software project.
Developers should be paid for their work when possible, in a perfect world.
I don’t think them making money is a problem at all really, it’s more of a good thing in my opinion. However it does completely nullify any arguments that everyone who works on this project is working for free, and is a volunteer. Quite a few (very important) developers are still donating their time for free though, to be fair.

I personally don’t think that profiting from it is a bad thing, and it typically motivates developers to work toward making it a better product (and it is a product now).

But any arguments of “you get what you pay for, har har” are kinda invalid when the developers are literally paid for working on it, even if some (most?) people are using it for free.

As for “HA developers arnt paid, only Nabu Casa is paid!”, the core devs are paid, and the pitch was specifically for “It will help fund development” and "money to support the development of Home Assistant and Hass.io" (quotes taken from the official announcements of NabuCasa by Baloob et alia, not invented by me).

So yes, the software is still free, and will remain that way according to “Home Assistant is open source and free to install and this will not change.” as stated by “system”. It’s a shame admins don’t let us see who actually is writing these thing anymore. (I learned that “system” posts are posts auto-copied from the blog, FYI. This comment was unnecessary inflammatory)

Nabu Casa isn’t free, and that’s OK, should be paid! It involves server costs, and they should be compensated for that at the very least. But the fees also support 6 developers paid to work on not just Nabu Casa, but also HA in general.

I work with a lot of industrial controls software in my professional life. To be honest, most of them suck. They had bugs, undocumented “features” that break often, and while it’s more stable than HA, somehow it still has many similar issues despite costing $10,000-$50,000+. So there’s no faulting the devs when free software is only marginally worse than that. However that expensive software has support, VERY detailed change logs, and (I can only assume) most of that $$$ goes to their very helpful support team that you can call to walk you through the issues.

HA isn’t making that kind of money, so I don’t expect phone support any time soon.
This whole “thing” is rather stupid, and caused by people who seem to not know how to communicate properly and effectively, and would rather brush off and hide on discord from the people who made their software popular.

However to call an installation “unsupported” implies that there’s some kind of support to begin with. While they do help quite a bit patching reported bugs, I think it’s fair to say that 75-90% of the “support” is by forum members who are 100% volunteers “working” for free.

The most active and helpful members are of the “power users” group whom the devs are pissing off the most in the recent changes this year. You piss them off enough, they’ll leave (because their smart enough to know how to use other software, and where they lead, others follow) and then what exactly does “supported” and “unsupported” mean, when all of the support was provided from the people who’ve left because you’ve pissed them off?

[Tinkerer (aka DubhAd on GitHub)]

@Silicon_Avatar

as stated by “system”. It’s a shame admins don’t let us see who actually is writing these thing anymore.

system is the bot that copies the blog posts over. If you look at the original blog post it shows you the author (Paulus in this case).

[pvizeli]

I think the discussion lost the focus of the issue. Everybody wants to run it elsewhere and nobody wants to help to maintain or be responsible for bugs.

I think this explain it nice:

unsupported installation message

In fact, Ubuntu stop working until the end of the year - also a lot of Synology based installed are today broken and more follow up because this company doesn’t hold here devices up to date and we can not support all docker version, Linux downstream Kernels or any kind of installation which not respect what the Supervisor is - a full system appliance and not just a software.

ADR0014 respect what we can handle with our small dev team. If the team grow and more Kernel hackers and developer are around which actively contribute and fix bugs for a different system, we can be looking over it again and extend the support. But today means, if you run an unsupported system, there is no developer and no warranty that the system does not break on the next update. The idea is to make better quality instead of quantity like before. Supported means, we are careful to test every update on such a system before we deploy it into the world to give the user the best experience around this platform.

[simeon-walker]

@KennethLavrsen

Then the absurd and totally unacceptable ADR where all protests were dismissed. An ADR that describes a Debian installation in which you are not allowed to install anything. We even got confirmation this included secure shell daemon meaning you cannot even login to the machine remotely. Absurd. Totally absurd. And if we do it anyway, we are now allowed to raise bug reports (they will be ignored - read the ADR!).

Huh, really?

I was thinking of going along with this and installing Debian but not you’re not even “allowed” to install other software into the system. No. Not paying good money for a half decent NUC that sits there doing mostly nothing all day.

Guess I will have to start looking at the alternatives and hope things don’t break before I have time to start all over again with something else. Sad.