I was running a supported Supervised installation because “I wanted to be able to run other services.” Given the limited abilities of my RPi4, I never really installed anything else besides Wireguard and maybe a cron job or two. My installation would occasionally go unresponsive and require a hard reset (unplugging) to come back online, so I backed up HA, wiped my drive, installed HA OS, and restored it all in one 3-hour span. The vast majority of that time was just spent waiting for the restore to finish, I probably spent less than 30 minutes actively doing anything.
After a few days, I have been very impressed by how much of a difference there is between Supervised and HA OS! My system is more stable (no more infrequent hangs) and even slightly faster for the same tasks. Memory management is clearly improved - things that could cause the system to hang before (e.g. compiling ESPHome firmwares) are much more reliable now. I’d been considering getting a more powerful system and trying out HA OS in Proxmox, but I’m pretty happy with the performance of my RPi4 now.
So thank you to the HA OS developer team! For anyone else debating Supervised vs OS, if you don’t REALLY need to run Supervised, HA OS is 100% the way to go!
I’ve never understood why people don’t use HAOS considering that so many posts are related to some sort of VM or docker setup. Why add this extra level of complexity. Backing up with HAOS seems much improved, quite safe. Don’t see any other advantages considering the wealth of small form-factor computers that do an adequate job running HAOS.
A supervised install is not really related to VMs or docker as such.
A supervised install just means you run the HAOS part yourself.
The HA part running on top of the supervised install will be the same as the one running on HAOS.
I have run supervised for a long time, because I had services that were able to run together with HA, but it do require a lot of understanding of both Linux service setups and how HA works to make it work well.
The stability of the machine should not be different between the two setups if you know how to setup and manage Linux well, but this require a level of expertise that is above the level of a general Linux user.
Today I am running HAOS too, since I got a “need” for more services (seems to the effect of HA), which could not be run together with HA, so I upgraded the hardware and installed HAOS in a VM and the other needed services on another VM with the services I had earlier run on the HA supervised installation.
HA is now maintained through HAOS, but I still maintain a system as before, it is just another VM now and the requirements to adhere to some standard are a little lower.
it do require a lot of understanding of both Linux service setups and how HA works to make it work well.
I think this is what tripped me up. I am a relatively novice Linux user and while I could install Supervised and maintain the system such that HA said it was “supported,” I clearly didn’t know enough to handle the infrequent system hangs that I encountered. I’m sure that the Linux system management performed by HA OS and the HA team is far superior to what I can do, which is likely what explains the perceived improvements in my installation.