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).
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Mostly only in response to other peoples repetitive and tedious posts.
Obviously you aren’t looking in the right place. 
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.)
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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:
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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?
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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).
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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:
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.
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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.
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It is my understanding that the Proxmox install is supported…the fact that I am not seeing the “unsupported” notice would also confirm this. While it is far from ideal, it does allow me to use my NUC for other things and still have a supported install of HA.
I have HA in a Debian VM running alongside an Ubuntu 20.00 VM and an Ubuntu 18.04 vm for my pihole server. Everything including, all my integrations, cameras, zigbee and zwave networks run just as fast in the VM as they did when I had the scripted Ubuntu install on the nuc.
I’m happy, but I also understand the frustrations of others here.
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That could help. It’s hard work keeping up though. I usually scan the release notes for things I’m using but didn’t notice this mentioned anywhere.
That’s the crux of the issue. Communication continues to bite the HA team in the butt. I’m sure there still would be complaints (you can’t please everyone)…but the surprise factor always worsens people’s attitude towards change. Hopefully they take note to avoid unnecessary frustration in the future…for them and the community.
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You can install anything you like, their point is that if it ends up breaking your Supervised install they won’t be able to assist in fixing it as you may have updated a library it needed.
You could always just throw the Supervised Debian install in it’s own little VM while you run other things in another VM on a NUC.
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It’s not in release notes, it’s on the installation page here.
Running as a VM has been possible for ever and a day. There are a number of ways to do it, one is using a Hypervisor like Proxmox. This allows you to run the HAOS image (fully supported) and then spin up other Ubuntu/Debian/Other Distro to run everything else you wish like Plex, MQTT, camera software, even a Windows VM to run Blue Iris if you wish. You can do this on cheap hardware, second hand workstations off eBay for under $100 are well suited, like an i5 Dell Optiplex, etc.
Guide to get Proxmox with HAOS going is here.
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You can also just run Core in Docker and not worry about the supervisor at all.
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Slightly OT, but strictly speaking Proxmox isn’t supported either, as there isn’t a native Image that can just be imported to Proxmox (the script converts the vhdx image). Perhaps there should be.
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You can use the QCOW2 image, you don’t need to use the script 
Any Hypervisor can be used to run a supported image.
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Hadn’t noticed that - is it recent? I did a trial install a while ago but not actually migrated. Why use the script then?
QCOW2 was in BETA for a while.
The script makes it easy more or less. Using the QCOW2 image requires some config which the script does for you to make things easier to get going.
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You should be able to install the proxmox addon and install other docker images (other software), as they do not touch the base OS.
This is what happens when you suddenly tell a large percentage of your user base that they are running an unsupported installation and give them no migration path to a supported one for 3 months. No commercial software company would be so foolish as to try that.
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Not supported but works just as good for most Ubuntu configurations.