Which Home Assistant? Hass.io, Hassbian or HA/AIO

I have been using Home Assistant for some time now. I originally installed it on a RPi3 with the AIO installer. Now there are a number of other options available in the form of Hass.io and Hassbian which I have not tried yet.
As Home Assistant progresses is there a direction to adopt one of these options as a v1.0 or will we continue with the three flavors of Home Assistant?

What are peoples thoughts on whether one option should be used or continue with all the options to give choices to users?

Fundamentally, I think Home Assistant should remain a python program that anyone can install and run however they like.

The various installation methods in the docs all seem to have different uses, so removing any one of them would be a loss to someone.

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Very simply put:

  • HassIO - an appliance like experience (based on Docker), that you can only easily extend through official add-ons
  • Hassbian - all in one OS+Home Assistant install to get you from nothing to a functional install quickly
  • AIO - already have a working Pi? Use this
  • Python Virtual Env - want more control of the install than the AIO gives you? Use this

I’d expect we’ll continue to see options, particularly if people step up to help support that range of options.

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