So, if openHABian supports Raspi 1 then I must say: it doesn’t work!
My impression was, that the openhabian installation script run into a timeout when starting the service at the end of the script due to the lame RPi 1. I will not retry, since I now have a better suited RPi 3B which works well. I don’t recommend using a RPi 1 for openHABian. It took ages (more than an hour) to install just to fail at the end.
Careful with wording, please.
“it doesn’t work” is not the same as “it didn’t work for me” (which is all you can claim) is not the same as “it is not supported”.
Noone does. The README tells to use a RPi2 or better.
I can confirm that there is a problem when flashing sd card with Balena Etcher. Yesterday I had the same problem with the installation loop. Tried different sd cards and different os versions (1.7.4, 1.7.3… ->), all flashed with balena. After a few hours of torture I found this post and tried to flash the same sd card and same os image with rufus. Everyting went as it should the first time. The os (1.7.4) installed and booted without any problems!