[On Hold] Deprecating Home Assistant Supervised on generic Linux

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1084

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.

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1085

Take a deep breath boys & girls…

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1087

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.

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1088

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.

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1089

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.

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1090

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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1091

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

Obviously you aren’t looking in the right place. :wink:

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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1092

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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1093

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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1094

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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1095

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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1096

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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1097

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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1098

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.

1099

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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1100

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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1101

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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1102

You can also just run Core in Docker and not worry about the supervisor at all.

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1103

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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1104

You can use the QCOW2 image, you don’t need to use the script :wink:

Any Hypervisor can be used to run a supported image.

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