This whole discussion, that I did not ask for, leaves me a bit reluctant to still reply but I will anyway. First of all I waited with this reply so I could think about it a little. I sometime need a step back, for a more balanced
reaction
@mstormi your replies made me feel attacked more than they made me feel helped. And as you have stated: I should not feel entitled to your help but I hope you agree this forum is a place where one should feel safe to ask questions even if people need to disagree. It is not so much your opinion, it has to do with the delivery. You can of course ignore this observation, but as you are spending so much time building openHABian I assume building the community is also close to your heart.
It was mentioned that my motivation and my level of knowledge could help understand where I am coming from, so I will still try to provide it.
First of all I, being impressed by the performance of the Raspberry Pi 4 8Gb I decided I wanted to use it to offload some of the things I have currently running on my âhome serverâ (firewall, fileserver, ftp, ldap and vpn server etc). In the past I moved openHABfrom that home server to a raspberry pi 3b (running openHABian)
Why USB:
- It runs much faster than from SD card
- One of the things I had in mind is to move e.g my nextcloud server to this pi
Why Ubuntu:
- It appears that even the Raspberry Pi OS is still in beta, Ubuntu server for ARM 64Bit is not and support appears to be pretty solid.
- I already had a USB bootable image
- Before I switched to manjaro, ubuntu was my OS of choice, I am familiar with ubuntu
(but also with raspbian, rhel and manjaro)
- Many application can be found and installed directly from the supported repositories.
- The openhab .debs are availble for ubuntu arm 64
I am not really happy with the performance of my current raspberry pi 3b , especially the response when a rule has not been triggered for a while (and is no longer in memory). So I thought to just try and see how the pi4 would handle openhab.
I could have just installed openhabian on the ubuntu Pi4 (I will probably do just that) but had a look at the documentation (on openhab/docs) and for openhabian there is a chapter âother linux systemsâ that provides no guarantees but also does not completely slam the door so I made a backup of my ubuntu Pi and just gave it a try.
So that brings me to:
Why openhabian:
- Easy installation of frontail, mosquitto, influxdb+grafana etc
I could do all this by myself but openhabian would make things easier.
- If it would work why not
So I know that openhabian was created with another intention but I can imagine that openHABian has value on any distribution. And although Ubuntu ARM 64 is not supported, it appears close to what is already supported. If it is worthwhile to consider this I of course leave up to you. I am more than happy to test this and share my experiences.
Sidenote:
In the openHABian documentation it says: âPlease note that we cannot test HW/OS combos upfront so there is no support / no guarantee for this work as explained in the README.â I expect that that should have linked to the readme you mentioned, at the moment it does not.