You first.

the very tone of this thread is suggesting that the HA developers choice in how they distribute their platform is “incorrect”

Not incorrect, just poor engineering. Anti-social ultimately.

you seem to disagree with explanations provided as to why those choices were likely made

I can see only two disagreements in the whole post. Only one of those is about the reasons for creating an OS rather than distro packages. I have corrected a number of factual errors and errors in reasoning but those aren’t disagreements.

Dismissing those statements and observations do not make them incorrect.

Yes, my dismissing of them is not what makes them incorrect.

Nothing I stated is dramatic

LOL “this evil developer is doing a sinister thing”

this evil developer is doing a sinister thing

Nobody has said that here.

that community

I’ve no idea what community you’re referring to. Nobody here has demanded that any developers cater to their distribution’s needs.

If your community is getting cut off because, frankly, it’s being unreasonable… don’t come here looking for a personal army.

Again, I’ve no idea what community you’re referring to. Nobody has come here looking for a personal army.

Your characterisation of the commentary on this post seems like that of an overly. dramatic. teenager.

This appears to bother a particular community who feel entitled enough to demand multiple developers cater to their distribution’s needs.

Your reading of the situation is wrong.

this is probably a ton of work, for which a purpose-built solution already exists: Docker

LOL Docker isn’t a “solution” to the pressure of good engineering.

it could not feasible

I disagree.

He alone has behaved like a child, dragging his end users along with him in his over-reliance on one failure point for his entire distribution system

Yeah, this is exactly as expected. Someone with poor engineering skills finding themselves in a position of power and making sure everyone knows they’re king of the hill. See this kind of thing all the time unfortunately :-(

the Home Assistant .deb distro package

Firstly, that’s a .deb but it’s not from a distro. Secondly, that .deb doesn’t contain Home Assistant, it contains some “Supervised” which runs the Home Assistant Docker container:

https://github.com/home-assistant/supervised-installer/blob/8dbfda2221b955dc810827285c5ac874eb0b70d9/homeassistant-supervised/usr/bin/ha#L10

LOL

They already pay attention to deployment and support several methods. Sure it’s not the method you have in mind. But the world doesn’t specifically revolve around you.

It’s not my method. Writing software with distributions in mind is the standard in free software development.

It’s just not easy.

Indeed. That’s why many engineers don’t bother. Especially poor engineers.

You should ask this to your favourite distro packagers, not to the home assistant developers.

I disagree. The Home Assistant developers are the ones who chose to create an OS. They could have chosen to create distro packages instead, or at least software which is amenable to being packaged by distros.

obsolete

What does that mean in the context of Home Assistant?

A lot of software isn’t packaged for Debian.

Yes, often projects which are engineered without distros in mind. Which is to say, engineered poorly.

You didn’t mention in your OP that it had to be debian distro packages.

It doesn’t. WTF are you talking about?

That’s manual installation which is (a) not distro packages and (b) exactly what distro packages are created to avoid.

docker images

Is not distro packages.

Arch Linux

It’s not in Debian. There’s no Red Hat packages either. Or OpenSUSE. It’s not even in OpenWrt which would make the most sense. So it looks like no useful, practical distro packages.

pip

Is not distro packages.

What do you mean with “Operating System”?

If I go to

https://www.home-assistant.io/

and click on “Installation”, ignoring the custom Home Assistant hardware, the first relevant section is “DIY with Raspberry Pi” whose tutorial has a section “Install Home Assistant Operating System”.

The second relevant section of the Installation page is “Install on other hardware” with a paragraph whose second sentence is “The Home Assistant Operating System allows you to install Home Assistant on these devices even if you have little to no Linux experience.”

all the add-ons and extra user stuff

You’re hand-waving the answer to my question :-) What add-ons and extra user stuff require Home Assistant to be an OS?

If you did all that as a package install, you would complain about all the dependancies and if you didnt install the right version of something Home Assistant might not work at all

That’s not how packages work. The packagers take care of all that. That’s the point.

Petition: “Please prevent this shitty behaviour?”

Government: “There’s nothing in law preventing this shitty behaviour.”

“Yes, we’re asking you to change the law you dipshits!”

Our government is just an appalling joke at this point.

Uhhh… recent? Did you perhaps miss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_America,_Inc._v._Hotz ?

This is not news. The man’s job was to make profitable games, not good games.