Yes, thank you so much for maintaining this for so long. It was amazing before I made the jump to Hass,io a little while back.
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First of all. Thank you for the great work. I started homeassistant with hass.io and switched to hassbian because snips did not work with it because Hass.io did not have the right/newest version.
I loved to be independent and that’s why I use hassbian and always will.
Thanks for the great work
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Thank you for supporting hassbian for so long. I have a number of programs running with cron that create MQTT transaction to update HA. Will I still be able to run these when I switch over to hass.io? Is this where I learn docker? thanks
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Oh wow… thanks to all the developer and will be very sad to lose hassbian since its my main driver until I move my HomeAssistant to Synology. However still used it from time to time for my RPI especially since 4B is out.
I dont like hass.io just because I wont have much control over the OS compare to Hassbian. Anyway I hope hassbian scripts will have a new dev, so it will continue to be used.
Again thank you for all the nice work…
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It depends on where you are running your other programs and how you ultimately decide to install Hassio.
If you have all those programs running on your hassbian machine and just install hassio using the instructions for "installing hassio on a generic linux server then there shouldn’t be any issues.
If you go with the hassio image it gets a bunch harder since you have less control over the OS (HassOS).
not necessarily.
If you go the hassio image route docker will be generally transparent to you.
if you stay with HA running in a venv then you won’t use docker any more than you do now.
If you install hassio in docker on the linux machine then you will need to learn docker.
Ohh .
first I need to thank you for the Home Assistant development.
its also sad to see that Hassbian is reaching this RIP phase.
I do prefer to have more control on the OS , and will need to decide how to move on …
real sad to see hassbian go … 
can you DEVs , prepare in the pi-gen repository a clean instruction document for keep using Debian as OS ? thank you
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My understanding from using both is that if you install raspbian, then install home assistant in a venv, it is pretty well the same as hassbian.
It’s a while since I used either though.
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Probably many people are using raspbian for other things than HA, so Hass.io is not a good solution.
But now that Hasbian is not officially mantained anymore, could be great to improve HA over raspbian.
For me, one of most annoying thing has been the ‘homeassistant’ user, so I would like to propose:
- Run HA in standar pi user (no need to change and permissons stuff when make external integrations)
- Follow XDG Base Directory Specification:
- config under ~/.config/homeassistant
- scritps under ~/.local/bin
- venv under ~/.local/share/virtualenvs/homeassistant
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R.I.P. Homeassistant
This means i have to look for another home automation software. I will not start writing docker files and developing my own containers for my shell scripts and additional packages i use from within my HA configuration. This was always a nogo for me. I don’t want another raspberry pi exclusively for HA either. I also run mosquitto and zigbee2mqtt from the same machine. i have written a few scripts to call me over voip as notification and switching some not supported led controller using rest api. Why should I develop a component if I can use the command line interface using a few lines of script outside HA. In addition i connected a bluetooth speaker in the hallway and give notifications, greetings etc using mpd. My first try with HA was using hass.io. I quickly gave up on it, because it could not integrate my own solutions in a simple way. Docker is elegant if you are not relying on thing outside your container, but you cannot simply extend this without the overhead of creating integrations for HA, which are then not usable for other applications.
You can still use HA as you did before, just on raspbian instead of hasbian.
There are Hass.io Addons for mosquitto and zigbee2mqtt, which are much easier to install and update. Of course you can write bash scripts and use them with Hass.io and of course you can use bluetooth with Hass.io, I use if for presence detection and control of bluetooth light bulbs.
And if you still want to use the complicated and error-prone way to can still install if via venc on a normal rasbian or whatever os you prefer
@KingRichard Just so you know you can install Hass.io through docker so you still have full control over your host OS this is what i have done on an Ubuntu Server.
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It seems there is a fundamental misunderstanding about the different installation methods for HA (maybe it’s my misunderstanding…but I doubt it…
)
Hassbian is literally just an image of the Raspbian OS with HA pre-configured to run in a virtual environment. The only real difference is it offers some additional utilities via the hassbian scripts. THose are in no way required at all to run HA on Rasbian even if you installed via the Hassbian image.
Once Hassbian “ends” nothing will change for existing users.
You can still continue to run and update the HA that you have now running in the venv just like anyone else can using the CLI in Raspbian. You can still use the existing Hassbian scripts (I’m pretty sure). They just won’t be being updated any longer.
The only thing that is happening is that the Hassbian image will no longer be offered and the scripts won’t be updated. That’s it.
If I’m mistaken then please correct me. If I’m not then people need to take a deep breath and just carry on as you already do.
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RIP silly users who think hassio is the only alternative to hassbian.
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No but i will loose updates and security patches on the underlying base system in the future.
On the other side installing to a new raspbian image is almost as good as starting from scratch.
I use home automation to have less effort controlling the device and systems based on events created by sensors etc. The emphasis is on LESS relearning new installation scripts and / or creating docker images for my own tools makes me rethink my choice for HA. I don’ have problems with linux or raspbian. I am a software engineer with knowledge in different languages and operating systems. I’m using linux for nearly 20 years now, but my HA installation is a tool for me not a hobby to try different approaches every few months.
Perhaps you could offer to take over hassbian maintenance then and keep it alive.
I am not sure how going with raspbian deprives you of updates and security patches. That is a very odd remark.
OTOH if you leave home assistant, no one will be overly concerned. Sorry to lose a user, but it is not a commercial product that relies on licence fees or advertising a huge user base.
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From the linux admin view hassbian is a special distribution containing HA. On some point someone has to maintain this distribution. You have to check patches for compatibility etc. If the base distribution moves to another kernel or libc or HA needs a new python version this has to be included and checked. Without a maintainer this will lead to problems and compatibility issues. If you use docker, containers are usually isolated agains each other. this makes it sometimes difficult to put your program A in a container and A’ and interchange data etc with a program B in container B’. Docker is a nice tool to use the resources of a big machine ( container host ) for a great number of services. These services normaly communicate via api calls ( rest, soap, … ), It is nice for a developer to rollout an new version of his product using docker, but a raspberry pi i not a big system. There will never be a lot of containers running on one raspberry pi, it is not powerfull (mostly in terms of RAM) for this use case.
That is 100% utterly not correct.
The base OS of hassbian is 100% a generic linux Debian OS optimized for a RaspberryPi - Many people refer to this as “Raspbian”. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?
Literally the only changes to the base linux OS image is that it adds the scripts to run a HA installation into a venv at first boot.
After that you can literally do everything on a Hassbian install that you can do on any other Raspbian install - including updates, patches and whatever else you want to do.
There is nothing to maintain. Once you burn a Hassbian image to an SD card and put it into your RPi then you can pretty much forget that the initial Hassbian image ever existed (except for the Hassbian Scripts. And even those existing on your system will still work until they get broken by changes to HA) and run your RPi just like every other Raspbian OS.
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For me, one of most annoying thing has been the ‘homeassistant’ user,
Why do you find it annoying to install and run homeassistant as the ‘homeassistant’ user?