Which OS for upgrade from RasPi 3 to NUC?

Installation
1

Hi all.

My RasPi 3B+ has served well for the last couple of years but is failing and corrupting the SD card frequently (multiple cards).

I’m upgrading to a mini PC (Gigabyte BRIX GB-BMCE-5105), with 8GB ram and SSD and plan on starting my configuration from scratch to tidy things up.

What OS and setup would be recommended?

I’ve always ran HassOS but I’m unsure if I should run the Generic x86-64 HA OS (I’d install with linux live USB) or should I use a VM on a Linux OS? I was thinking Ubuntu server in case I wanted to run other services on the mini PC.

What would you experts recommend?

Cheers

2

A Debian Linux variant and HA Container. Anything else is a waste of resources.

3

I prefer the HA container installation but you may prefer HA Supervised since it uses addons like the HAos install. In that case the only supported OS is a vanilla Debian installation (no extra services installed).

4

Valid alternative. I do not use Supervisor or (HACS) Add-Ons because it’s always the later that cause issues on HA updates.

1 Like
5

I personally find some HA Addons like zwavejs or community addons like zwavejs2mqtt cause more issues than running the official developer released version of zwavejs2mqtt. The zwavejs integration works fine with that.

HA container, for me is easy to upgrade when I choose. I have all my data stored locally, separate from HA. I run the official zwavejs2mqtt Docker container to interface with HA. Since they are connected only using websockets, there are minimal dependencies. For testing, I have even run this on a Pi 3B+.

6

Thanks guys. My hardware gets delivered next week so that gives me time to read up.

I’ll probably go with MX linux and Docker (I assume following this install of HA. It will be headless after setup but I’ll set up a remote desktop for other software if I need it.

I did consider Ubuntu server but that might involve extra learning.

Cheers

7

With Home Assistant container, only the current plain vanilla Debian version is supported. If it is headless, Ubuntu gains you nothing of value, in my personal opinion.

I like to keep things simple so this is the shell script I use to set up HA Container. You can replace the version numbers with latest but I decided to stay back on 2021.11.x for now.

The first line updates your image and is most useful if you are using ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:latest.

I “cheat” & run a privileged container so I do not need to worry about port mappings, etc. I made a docker folder in /opt/homeassistant to keep the script. I like having all the data in one place.

docker pull  ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:2021.11

docker run --init -d \
  --name homeassistant \
  --privileged \
  --restart=unless-stopped \
  -v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro \
  -v /opt/homeassistant:/config \
  --network=host \
  ghcr.io/home-assistant/home-assistant:2021.11
8

Thanks Prodigy.

I never thought about using Debian as I’ve never used it plain. I’m used to MX, Mint, Ubuntu etc

When I say headless I’ll still use remote desktop for GUI stuff once the initial setup is done.

Thanks for the script, I’ll give it a bash.

Cheers

9

HA has no GUI setup needed. The GUIs in Linux use a LOT of resources that can be better used elsewhere in my opinion.