There are multiple ways to install HA, and when reporting issues it is useful to describe which one. However, the way they are described is not consistent with anything displayed in the HA UI or throughtout the documentation.
In Github where I would report bugs I am presented with the following choices:
Core
Operating System
Supervisor
In these forums the installation section refers only to Home Assistant OS.
If I go to Settings > About in HA it gives version numbers for three of the options!
Home Assistant
Supervisor
Operating System
So when it comes to answering the most basic question of which type of HA installation I have, I am confused as to which answer to give.
The best thing would be to have a clear label in the Settings > About page that answered the question categorically.
Note that the Bug Report link in my HA takes me directly to the Home Assistant Core bug reporting page - but I am not at all confident that Core is the right answer, since the description in the Installation types describes this as:
Run the Home Assistant Core application directly on Python. It does not provide the full Supervisor experience, and thus does not provide the Supervisor panel and add-ons.
I’m definitely not doing that and I have add-ons.
If you don’t know what you installed, you installed Home Assistant OS. Anyone else is going to know what they installed because the bar is significantly higher for all the other install methods.
That’s because it’s not asking for the type of installation you are running when submitting the bug report. It’s asking you what aspect of the HA environment the bug is about - is about the HA core software (which everyone has) or is it about the OS itself that core runs in (which only users who installed HA OS have) or is it about the supervisor functionality only (that only users who installed either HA OS or HA Supervised have).
On that page it is telling you which versions of three aspects of your particular installation of HA you actually have installed on your machine.
Since it us actually showing a version for OS then you are running a HA OS installation ir you wouldn’t see a version for it. As an example I run a HA Container install so I don’t have an OS version displayed.
That is helpful for you to tell me here and now, but my point is that one shouldn’t have to ask the question in the forum.
There are a lot of places where this could be answered better - all the ones I linked to above are currently not helpful. HA’s GitHub Bug Reporting form (which says Home Assistant Core) points to Settings > About right where it is asking What type of installation are you running?
When you install, and more importantly use, this kind of software you accept at least some minimum requirement for understanding how the software works and some associated basic terminology.
No matter what anyone tries to imply this is not an “appliance” that you can just plug in to the wall, read a couple of pages in a manual to figure out how to even turn it on and walk away. This is a fairly sophisticated system with lots of moving parts which requires some moderately in-depth understanding of those parts.
If you don’t understand just the very basic “what is my installation type?” then further research is needed especially even beyond that question. Including asking on the forums. And lots of people are usually glad to help you out.
