I’ve been running Hassio on a raspberry pi for about 15 months. It’s been fine but I worry that eventually the card will die at the wrong time so I’ve decided to move it to a “production” system. Hassio has been relatively fine for me. I’ve used my own docker images instead of plugins except for a couple basic things. I’ve had one or two instances where it would have been helpful to have access to the OS but it hasn’t been a show stopper. Frankly, most of my problems have been with breaking changes.
So I spent a couple hours with a Hassbian image running on Docker and added my zwave network and a couple other things. It seemed fine. So then I pulled a Hassio image and restored my config and it also seems fine.
So my question is, which is better if my main goals are ease of use, minimum maintenance, and flexibility with zwave? My actual true need of this system is to expose my zwave network over rest/websockets; everything else is really just gravy. The perfectionist in me wants to manage it all myself but the pragmatist in me thinks I should stick with Hassio. I understand this question gets asked a lot but it always seems to be “Hassio is for newbies and Hassbian is for people that know Linux.” I can get around Linux but I’m not looking to spend my nights and weekends ssh-ing into a terminal.
Even as I think about it now I’m wondering why not just stay with Hassio until I have a use case that warrants the change. They seem fairly portable as long as one doesn’t have a heavy plug-in dependency.
So I ended up running full blown Hassbian in docker. It didn’t make sense at the point that I wasn’t going to let Hass.io manage all my images. If it becomes a maintenance issue I might revert or if I decide to go all in on Hass.io plugins.
Retiring your Pi for reason of failing SD cards is no longer an issue. The Pi3 onwards will boot from a variety of USB mass storage devices. In fact the Raspberry Pi 3b + is already configured to do so without any adjustments.
I really cannot see the reason why anyone would want to go to the expense of purchasing a unit that may well be multiples of the cost of a Raspberry Pi 3 to run Home Assistant.
I upgraded from an RPi 3 to a gently-used Intel Core i3 NUC. Installed Debian, installed docker, installed Hass.io running in docker. It runs very quickly, no issues whatsoever. If I want to SSH into Hass.io, I can do so with the plugin. If I want to SSH into the Debian host system, I can do that, as well. But I rarely ever need to do so.
