I’ll grant you that not everybody needs the feature set found in the OS/Supervised versions but if the analytics are to be believed, most people do opt for the additional administration features they provide.
Best as in “only” because Supervised wouldn’t be officially supported on it, so you get the core of Home Assistant without the available administration features (which is how I initially used it on Ubuntu, first Core, then Container, and then Supervised on Debian because ‘full-meal deal’) .
Arguably, anyone competent enough to install and manage Core /Container and a Linux distro, wouldn’t be authoring a “What should I install?” thread.
Feel free to be a jerk to @123 but I guarantee you will be grateful for his help sooner than you think. I doubt there are many active users on the forum who haven’t benefitted from his advice and help.
Generally echoing the sentiment above but would strongly recommend using a supported installation method. That doesn’t necessarily mean starting from scratch with debian but you should be aware of the limitations if you don’t. Since Linux Mint qualifies as “Other Linux” you should follow one of the installation options laid out here. Of these, installing in a VM is the only one which will get you the complete experience (i.e. including supervisor and add-ons).
If the VM approach isn’t something your interested in (it does work well but there can be some challenges depending on how much direct host access you need) then the Core and Container approaches are also laid out on that page. Those work fine but you will likely end up spending more time managing supporting infrastructure. To give an example, HA now only has native support for Zwave if you are in a supervised or operating system install. If not then it cannot set up the required add-on for you and you will have to deploy and configure the supporting ZWaveJS or ZWaveJS2MQTT services yourself. That also applies to MQTT for that matter. HA doesn’t just set that one up for you but the supervised install does have essentially a one-click install option to deploy Mosquitto. In Container or Core you’ll need to set that up yourself. Could go through more but you probably get the point.
But yea, those are your options. If you like them then go for it. If after a bit you find yourself fighting with supporting infrastructure a lot then consider carving out some time to switch to Debian or HAOS so HA can manage more of it for you.
However I definitely would not recommend straying outside the options on that page and trying to do something like install supervised on Linux Mint. You will encounter issues if you do. Supervisor is not friendly to unsupported systems and you will very likely find yourself blocked from doing basic things like updates without explanation. And no support will be given if you ask from the dev team in these cases, you’ll just be posting here and praying someone else hit your issue too and solved it. Which according to analytics.home-assistant.io is becoming less and less likely.
Statistics are a double edged sword. You could argue that advanced people who want more control and use bare metal installations will also be the kind of people to turn off analytics. I am part of this group. There is also the point of communication. HA OS and Supervised are the most communicated and most visibly recommended install options, which may skew the statistics to some extent. Not saying that this is a bad thing. It’s just important to put statistics into the right context.
No, best as in ‘best’. Unsupported does not mean uninstallable. Official support is an option, not a requirement. If you can live with the limitations of being unsupported and are ready to fix potential issues arising from it, then Supervised can be an option on non Debian systems as well. Not the best one, I’ll give you that. But an option nonetheless.
You could also argue that people with core/container being potentially more savvy users will not even turn them on. Nevertheless with 24000+ users being represented in the stats I think they are probably fairly accurate.
Oh on a larger scale, they certainly are. It shows that a lot of people are using HA as a self contained and dedicated appliance, by using HA OS. Which was, as far as I understand, a strategic goal of the core team.
That said, I’m still pretty certain that the two more advanced install methods are under-represented, for the reason you mentioned. By how much, impossible to say.
I agree that the “best” option is the one that fits the users needs and skill level. In the context of the OP’s request, what you defined as the “best” option is one where the OP would be handling all administrative aspects of the system. I may be wrong but the “vibe” I got is that those kind of demands might not be the best fit for the OP. Consider it a strategic move to recommend Supervised in order to minimize future demands for support.
I don’t exactly see a direct ha os install for a PC, only linux VM or windows VM. Am I missing something or why would I need to use the VM? It will be a dedicated HA machine.
If your PC’s hardware is compliant with Intel’s NUC standard, then you can use the NUC image of Home Assistant OS. If not, your options are to run Home Assistant OS in a Virtual Machine or use Home Assistant Supervised on Debian (same functionality as Home Assistant OS minus the operating system which you must supply and Debian is the only officially supported distribution of Linux). See: Compare Installation Methods.
I managed to do a supervised install on debian and restored the configuration and it seems to be working
What is the best way to access and update the os (debian)? I don’t plan to have a monitor or keyboard&mouse connected so ssh or remote desktop would be best.
Thanks; I needed to install and enable ssh server, that’s why it didn’t work when I tried.
Is creating a snapshot bugged? Because it isn’t that much faster than on rpi4 which is weird. Install, load, startup,… everything else seems to noticeably benefit from more powerful hardware.
