You can’t get that without using the supervised version. I agree, the Supervisor functions are very very nice and wouldn’t go back to using Home Assistant without them!
The Supervised install WILL use docker itself, but the ‘supervisor’ program will manage it all in the background, so you do still need it.
If you aren’t using the NUC for anything else, the recommended way is to pull the hard drive and apply the NUC image to it just like you would apply an image to a raspberry pi sd card and use it as kind of an appliance. Details: https://www.home-assistant.io/hassio/installation/
Otherwise, if you need it for other things and want to just have Ubuntu (or whatever) installed on it, you can do the ‘Home Assistant Supervised’ based install. I think the installation details for this method got purged when they depreciated it as an ‘approved’ install method, because I can’t find them, but there should be plenty of resources out there for it.
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EDIT: Found one: Installing Home Assistant Supervised on Debian 10
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Last, you’d always have the option of installing a hypervisor and running it in a VM (that’s what I do, using Proxmox, but not with a NUC). This worked for me (but doesn’t go into how to install proxmox): Supervised Install on Proxmox