“Hacky?” Bullshit.
Fuck anyone who just wants to run a lightweight service on a home server, right?
If you read the Home Assistant official announcement, it basically says all the different methods were confusing to new people so they will remove them from end user support documentation and won’t take support questions from people using these methods.
However, outside the deprecation of 32bit OSs (which they point out a large portion are on 64bit capable hardware), they are still going to be documenting the other methods in the developer documentation.
I honestly think this is the right move. Their time is being wasted by confusing new users, and supporting 32 bit OSs is literally preventing the development of new functionality. If you want to use a Python environment instead of docker, the developer documentation is there to support advanced users.
I did read it, thanks. It’s not clear from their statement that they would maintain any sort of documentation for such methods.
It says
As these installation methods are used for the development of Home Assistant, it will still be technically possible to update them. We still would recommend migrating to a supported method, but that’s your choice.
And then towards the end:
Will the developer documentation on these things remain?
Yes, those will remain. The developer documentation for running Home Assistant’s Core Python application directly in a Python virtual environment will remain. This is how we develop. This proposal is about removing end-user documentation and support.How I read it is that these methods are actively used for development so will still be maintained and updated, including developer documentation because developers will continue to need to use these methods.
There’s no need for hostility, your characterization of what is happening does not reflect reality.
This is really disappointing. My HA Supervised install was running fine last year on an old laptop and unsupported distro. In order to move to a supported installation of HA I purchased a very efficient fanless laptop specifically sized to run Debian 12 and HA Supervised. This install has been rock solid and the opposite of “Hacky” (despite Howtogeek’s clickbait title), and I expected it to easily last 5+ years. It’s been 8 months.
Of course Home Assistant developers need to sometimes EOL specific configurations and dropping 32bit hardware support was overdue (the last 32 bit Raspberry Pi was released over 10 years ago), but 6 months is an absurdly short amount of notice to give users of supported configurations on supported hardware that they’re going to be forced to migrate to something else.
6 months is not “absurdly” short considering it won’t suddenly stop working. It’s an open source project, 6 months is fairly reasonable for such circumstances.
I stopped upgrading about 6 months ago and am very happy with the decision. I had to say goodbye to some cloud services but it’s saved me a ton of time and hassle.
Meh, I guess I will need to find a new way to install Home Assistant on my Orange Pi.
The instructions I found apparently uses the supervised version even if it’s running in docker.
It’s been a while since I looked into installing/reinstalling HA but AFAIK using anything else than a Raspberry Pi seems discouraged, which is… discouraging.
It’s been a while since I looked into installing/reinstalling HA but AFAIK using anything else than a Raspberry Pi seems discouraged, which is… discouraging.
I don’t think that’s the case, the docker containers are still going to be officially supported, and you can run those on any hardware.
I’m not sure how my install works, as I just found a script that installed everything for me and it worked on different SBCs. However, when I look into “About”, HA says the installation method is supervised. And according to the article, this is precisely what is going to stop being supported.
Home Assistant is deprecating two installation methods, meaning they will continue working for now, but support will end in six months with the release of Home Assistant 2025.12. This includes Home Assistant Core, which runs in a Python environment, and Home Assistant Supervised, which involves running your own operating system underneath Home Assistant.
This is what I do. I have an Orange Pi 3b as a file server but it also runs HA in a docker image on top of that. I guess I’ll just wait and see if it stops working. If so I’ll try to reinstall using whatever “new/official/supported” method they want, and if not working, I’ll jut give up on HA.
It depends on what you’re running, but if it’s running in Docker using the official images, it will still be supported. The article explicitly says:
The Home Assistant operating system and container images (like Docker) will be the only supported installation methods.
You can run these images on any system/SBC, so nobody is discouraging “anything else than a Raspberry Pi”.
Do they still support the OVA installation method?
That’s just Home Assistant OS packaged in OVA.
