https://lwn.net/Articles/828428/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1019619/

That is a very subjective opinion.

As was already mentioned, people rarely want to run a dedicated physical server for just a single purpose. The concept of Home Assistant Operating System requires exactly that.

Also, it is Debian-based. It uses the `apt` package manager which is slow. Some people may prefer something faster and more modern, like `pacman` or `dnf`.

> run perfectly virtualized

Fair enough.

But that obviously requires virtualization being set up on the server. If people do not use virtualization for anything else on their server, they may as well set up Home Assistant directly.

Finally, I think there is one more issue.

Many of the integrations which are possible with Home Assistant Operating System require physical hardware being connected to that server. A reader, a receiver, something like that.

But these home servers are often placed in some inaccessible locations, like an attic, where the data from sensors is unavailable. It may be impractical to run cables there. And the wireless devices may be too far away for a receiver located there to be able to read them.

So people need to come up with work-arounds to get their data to their server. They set up various signal proxies and thin clients which receive the data from the sensors on the spot where they are available and then send them over network to the Home Assistant server.

Unfortunately, from my experience, many integrations completely ignore this usecase. They are likely focusing on a happy path where everything is connected locally to "the one" server. And only then they behave nicely and work out of the box. But as soon as you need any special step or behavior, it is necessary to dig deeper and create custom layers to transport the data from your devices to the server.

Home Assistant Operating System does not make any of that simpler. Perhaps on the contrary, it forces you to use a specific Debian-based distribution with possibly outdated packages that you cannot easily upgrade without breaking Home Assistant.

Which is why it makes little sense to bother with it, in my opinion, for these kind of installations.

Not having HAAS has made little difference to me being able to do all sorts of stuff - and HACS gives you access to a whole bunch of additional stuff, and works in docker.

If you use ethernet, no editing required. Web interface goes into setup mode automatically.

Worth noting that ha cli[0] (ha>) does have a `network` command to configure this as well.

[0] https://github.com/home-assistant/cli

I will admit that low (or zero) maintenance is easier to accomplish if you know your way around a little bit.

The other think I'm not a huge fan of is it's template language, it's clunky to say the least, but overall it's a great amd flexible system