Hope you are all doing well. So I am hoping I can get some input on a new installation. So Ive had Hass supervised installed on a Mac Pro running Debian 10 for several months now. It has been relatively painless but Im starting to encounter network drops periodically everyday. Its clogging the logbook and it also locks out access and its getting rather annoying. Well, our family recently started using JellyFin for media consumption. Its great, but Debian 10 does NOT have the necessary requirements to allow HEVC decoding. As a result, I had to move to Debian testing/Sid to enable. Nothing is necessarily wrong, aside from the dropouts. But Im thinking of doing a full reinstall but Im not sure which option to choose. Jellyfin demands Mesa driver 20.1, which Debian 10 does not have and Debian 10 is the only officially supported method. My brother and I plan on adding more docker containers to further enhance home services on the mac to justify its high idle power consumption.
What would my options be? Any input is greatly appreciated!
Stay with the Supervised install, and accept that you’re unsupported. If something breaks because you’re not running Debian you get to fix it (probably with the help from other forum members who’ve alsy had it break).
Move to using the Docker install method. You have to give up the point and click install of add-ons and learn how to use Docker Compose files (which are YAML files describing how a container should be configured). This is only likely to break if you break it.
Beyond that, you could install some VM software and run Home Assistant OS in a VM. That’s fully supported, but you get to manage the VM setup.
Thank you for the insight! So using the Docker method will allow me to use the same addons, but rather installing them by punching them in to the machine terminal? I dont necessarily have a problem with that since Im pretty experienced with Linux, but Docker is still something Im learning, such as understanding user groups, allowing it access and such. But aside from that, home assistant will be the same? Im used to using hassio but the only hassio features ive ever used is the core update and the addon page.
You’ll need to forget that word because it was deprecated many months ago. hassio was the name of a combination of custom operating system Home Assistant as a docker container, and a few other docker containers including one called Supervisor to manage the system. It was installed as a disk-image and available for specific hardware platforms (notably Raspberry Pi and Intel NUC). It is currently known as Home Assistant OS.
What you appear to have is currently known as Home Assistant Supervised. It has everything I described above, except the custom operating system. It is designed to run on Debian. However, it can run on other distros but then it is not considered to be “officially supported” (supported exclusively by the user-community). You should know that even if you use Debian, the machine is supposed to be dedicated to Home Assistant and for no other purpose. If you run other things on it, the development team deems it to be unsupported.
In practice, many people use Home Assistant Supervised on, for example, Ubuntu, with other services/containers, and it works well.
For more information about the four ways you can install Home Assistant, see this post:
Apologies for the incorrect word usage. I started using Home Assistant earlier this year so Im still not fully familiar with the terminology.
So fundamentally, while the HA devs deem my system and use case unsupported, there are a lot of people who still do it. Would it still be wise to use the Docker install method? I want to keep this process relatively painless, although I have had no reason to discontinue use of my current setup. However, the network drops are bugging me.
That’s a personal call. There’s no global right or wrong here, however if you’re running on the same OS as others, and everybody with that OS has the same problem, then the odds of finding a fix go up.
That said, Debian Sid is probably the least “risky” option here if you’re going away from Buster.
So after a few days of trying both different instances, I have decided to stick with Supervisor. Docker management is something I still havent become accustomed to. I was also having serious difficulty with getting reverse proxy to work and at that point, I gave up and went with supervisor. Hopefully I wont break something, Im sure I wont, but if anyone is curious, HA Core requires some patience and good understanding of Docker, something I lack.