Hi nickrout.
You hit a sensible point 
I’ll try Debian on my Raspberry Pi 4 - 8GB.
Will Debian run as wel on Raspberry as Raspbian ?
New chalenge is coming ^^.
Kr,
Dom
Raspbian is Debian, with some minor adjustments and Raspberry branding. So yes, Debian will run just fine.
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Yes it is…so adding a Raspberry to it wouldn’t make sense 
And since it is running anyway, it might as well run HA
And mine runs a VM image using HA Os (which runs docker and is supervised)
Raspbian no longer exists. It now Raspberry Pi OS. It has a few differences from debian, and supervisor is only supported on debian NOT Raspberry Pi OS.
But yes, there is a debian specifically for RPi and it is expected to run well.
But you want an easy configuration. Personally I just installed Home Assistant OS on a SD card and I dedicated the whole Pi 4 to HA. It works very well. I don’t see the point of managing the OS. And I managed hundreds of servers in the past. I am also familiar with containers and VM but I want an easy setup.
I have a Conbee II dongle for zigbee and Zooz Z-wave dongle.
I use ZHA for the zigbee integration and z-wave JS for z-wave.
Once the SD card is flashed, you boot it and that’s it.
From there you install integrations 1 by 1. You can start with zigbee and add a device. When you’re happy you install another one.
But if you really want an easy setup, just buy a Smartthings hub. It’s easy but you will not get the same flexibility.
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The name hassio was replaced, almost a year ago, by the name “Home Assistant OS”. If you refer to the official documentation, you won’t find any reference to the old name.
There are four ways to install Home Assistant in order to provide users with more choices to suit their needs. They are described in the Installation documentation and compared in a table (at the bottom of the page). Another comparison is provided in Community Guides: Home Assistant Installation Methods
The recommended installation method is Home Assistant OS because it contains additional functionality that makes it easier to administer the system. The remaining three types all require the user to know how to install and manage the operating system.
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Home Assistant relies extensively on containers. If you install it with a dedicated HW, you will let HA manage the containers for you.
For example, the HA core is running on a dedicated container, separated from Z-wave JS and separated from the File editor.
Now if you want to go by yourself and install HA core on your own container infrastructure, you cannot use the add-on service inside HA, since HA does not manage the container stack anymore. This is why, if you want a simple setup, avoid installing it on a container.
That’s just a rename that came with the 64bit build. It’s still Debian, there are very few actual differences. Package versions might differ though and that’s probably the reason why HA Supervised only supports Debian officially. Hard to debug things if the version of dependencies differ.
The difference is described here: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-os-no-longer-raspbian
TL;DR Raspberry Pi OS 64 bit doesn’t use any Raspbian code. (It’s probably just an overcomplicating aside in this thread)
Right. In the end, if you want an officially supported Supervised install, you should install Debian anyway, as you mentioned.
It is not a end user product. It is a hobby for people with time. That’s one of reasons why no younger people use such things (was a question in another thread).
Other problems / or challenges
- documention (to short / to smal, sometimes incomplete, outdated, very distributed (YT, Forum, GitHub, Website, Chat etc. pp.)
- forum threads with hundreds or thousends of posts in one single thread which no one can make use of (if not in from begin on), weak structured
- only very few examples and if any, often does not work right away if at all
- Version problems (does the information belong to my version or usage -> install type, front end edit type, include concept, software release version etc. pp.)
- Some things work like a charme and one wonders “WOW!!” other are a nightmare although it is about normaly absolute basics (CSS / HTML front end output aarrgghhh…)
Conclusion: is is much harder than it could be to set things up. Support and especially documentation has lots of room to grow /expand.
Disclaimer: i’ am in the IT for more than 30 years. Developing at all stages with varoius development systems and languages. I do homeautomation for five or six years. Startet with fhem and actually trying / working on a switch over to HA
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We look forward to your improvements to the documentation, although I certainly agree about the forum, often very difficult to find stuff and great uncertainty about up to dateness. (Is that a word?)
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Winner! That’s the expected answer 
in just seconds.
Maybe i will assist in the future. But this means i have build and aquire the knowledge to contribute…
I’ am not complaining here. But it should be possible to say: he’s that does not work without doing the work on myself (because of not capable).
I think lot’s of things are really great, but a system like HA is only worth half without a good documentation.
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Funny, I’ve also worked full-time in IT for nearly 30 years though I’m just starting with HomeAssistant. I’m confident I’ll eventually figure things out but I would figure that after all these years there would be some good startup guides.
Not a complaint, love the product. But it’s a reasonable request from the first poster as there is no reason to reinvent the wheel if someone has put some general tips together for us newbies.
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Since you are expert in Linux then you should go running supervised version. Its very stable and best of all you get supervised official version. I’m running that version without any problem.
I wrote an article to quickly install it. https://krdesigns.com/articles/installation-home-assistant-with-supervisor-on-debian-10
I also made a bash script to assist installation https://github.com/tirtadji-com/rpi_debian_ha_supervised
aceindy,
in your case, you have the right configuration.
The advantage of a small part of hardware (Raspberry or eventually a NUC, also a good idea ;)) is that you can let it live his life on itw own somewhere in a hidden place 
You transformed your laptop in a “server”, for the rest, you have done the right choci 
Kind regards
Dom
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nickrout,
you are 100% right
I just downloaded the latest OS Version from the Raspberry official site.
I never understood why we need to change product naming convention.
I’ll have a try to Debian for Raspberry.
Thanks for that precision.
Kind regards,
Dom
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Here’s a few…
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champdemars,
I think we have a similar experience on computer world, and I’m not an adept of the “click and go”.
I indeed look for the flexibility, but even more for reliability. I’m an old guy, and machine have to totally under human control, not the reverse reason why I want full and total control of my environments, even more on such one, which may have impact on my privacy, if not correctly secured.
That’s why I bought a Raspberry 4 - 8GB and an USB-3 SSD of 1TB.
That will make the system faster and also reliable.
My current config does not allow me to update the server, there are some errors somewhere.
Bref, I’ll save my current config parameters and restart from scratch.
Debian interest me, as I get full control on the security parameters and monitoring, the “all-in-one” also, but the security eventual issues make me dubious … 
But your arguments are also valuable, …
Kind regards,
Dom
Taras,
My HA is running since Feb-2020 (hassos_rpi4-3.11.img.gz) on Hassio (in test mode, just playing with one light), only one year old !
It does not seem to be possible to upgrade to that “new HomeAssistant OS”.
This is not fair, at least for such an environment that has to be used by “dummy people”, once installed.
For some configurations (ZigBee or …) you need to install a MQTT server.
If you have the Raspberry installed with “Home Assistant OS”, you can’t install anything else on that system, thus, you need another one for tools like MQTT, …
Why not having everything under one main platform and managing it using HA ?
Kr,
Dom