Unsupported OS detected

General
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Good night sirs, madams,

Today I felt like I was ready to install the minor "5.1" update. I ran the "5.0" beta for a long time, and it worked great, Surely this is going to be just some polishing right? And in fact, during all of this, even version "5.1.1" came out.... but the experience was not as smooth as I was used to from you awesome coders. I would love to share my experience.

First of all, you need to know I am a big fan of Pi-hole. And you also need to know i'm a curious person. Lastly I'm someone that does a lot of reading. So all this combined, I'm not a stranger to the tweets between Pi-hole and HA. Nor did I back away from trying AdGuard.

This only strengthened my believe that Pi-hole has a unique take on the topic. And even though I am a fond believer of self-contained software that installs hassle free, I do believe that in the end it comes down to features and raw power. And in my opinion, Pi-hole takes the golden medallion on that one. From the way it allows to configure individual clients, ad lists and the mitigation of the regression of mass importing lists, up until the shiny and well appreciated "dark theme". Pi-hole is ahead on so many fronts, even if its, in other people's words "just a collection of 3rd party tools with a bit of scripting". That is not incorrect, but definitely not doing justice. I'm not blind to the hard work of the folks here.

But I do have this beef, as of today. Since AG is considered the "out of the box working lazy man tool" and pi-hole the "slightly more complicated but more powerful tool", I was surprised to be met with this warning today when installing pi-hole on a fresh system: "Unsupported OS detected".

Now I do understand that you have a preferred environment, and for good reasons. But as we just established, Pi-hole is for the power user. And power users know (or should know) what it is all about. And I like to think I do. I ran Pi-hole on my Linux Mint successfully for a long time. And with it being a descendant from Ubuntu, why would it not. But now, today, I was unable to install it because Pi-hole is telling me "The pope tella 'me nope" in one way or another.

Why not say: we support X, Y and Z, but if you want to install this on your Q, press enter and do so on your own risk?

Of course the Pi-hole users can set an environment variable too. But why do they need to? Why not a simple Yes/No question?

This is not about competition. In my eyes you have none. But this is about Pi-hole providing an experience to each of its users that is fluent and comfortable. Just like it is after you installed it.

Anyways, that were my 2 cents. Keep up the amazing work guys, i love it.

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Thanks for the compliments.

There are a myriad of linux configurations that are possible with operating systems to run Pi-hole. Most of the time they work, often they don't. We have to judge where a good portion of our time is spent. Do you want the developers handling support all the time, or actually developing new features and tools. We think the latter is a better use.

Unsupported OSes will stop the installer, you are given the exact directions to install anyways. If you chose to install anyways then you provide your own support. We know that most people will ignore that fact and ask anyways, and we'll do what we can to still provide support but it needs to be very clear that you are going to be doing most of the work yourself. Being able to follow the override instructions is a good judge of whether you have the skills to do your own support.

A dialog box Yes/No will be ignored, Yes selected and never even read. Instructions to press a certain key will be the same.

The best way to solve this? Provide the community with the information and tools to make the OS a supported OS. We don't limit the supported OSes for any reason other than they are ones we use, can test on and can fix when things go wrong.

I completely disagree. It's for people that have never heard "linux" before in their lives, and a very large percentage of users are people that have bought their first Small Board Computer ever. Pi-hole has a ton of poweruser tools available but it's fully functional for someone that doesn't know what an IP is to begin with.

You can still install right now, you just need to follow the directions provided on how to do that. It's really not difficult to do at all.

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I'm sorry. That was put too hardly on my behalf. Pi-hole is indeed very easy to get started with. What I mean't was, and this might just be a language barrier, I'm Dutch... it is more powerful. Easy to use, but way more options for the pro. Not as basic as the alternatives.

Call me a purist. But setting a permanent environment variable for the installation of one piece of software is less than an ideal situation. It bugs me and some 48 colleagues working IT for me in a company in the Netherlands. We would prefer a Y/N. But I do hear your valid response; people go by those questions too fast, we get them a lot in *nix. So how about a more elaborate question, like: type "i will be on my own" and then go on? Its truly about having to set an env var since that impacts a lot of profiles for many servers.

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You don't need to. Do a one time in-line variable. Set the variable for the environment you're running the command in. Don't export it, don't set it in an .rc

You pay nothing for support, the software is free. There are no service contracts. If you're deploying Pi-hole across many servers then you really should be showing a lot more consideration to the developers. If this is a tool that is saving your IT company money in time or software, or you're selling Pi-hole as a service then contribute back to the community.

That's very convoluted and frankly more trouble to code than it's worth.

You want to have it work without workarounds? Get the OS you use to be supported.

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But a Y/N could still suffice. No need for it, other than to enlarge the difficulty. Which I believe there is no need for. But its fine to disagree.

I, and therefore my team, have offered to help. We would love to. We have done so for many years. We have expressed idea's. we offered to code along, we have pointed out problems and how to fix them, down to the file, line and solution. Make no mistake.

The question is why. I'll break it down:

Raspbian -- not powerful enough (for corporate environments, at home it works very well)
Ubuntu -- problems with commercial choices and flatpak
Debian -- overkill for an extended IPS
Fedora -- same
CentOS -- not even close to a suitable os for IPS/AMB

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But if you guys could just add Linux Mint, since it works well, I'd love you to do it.

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That's where you come in, that's your job. You get it supported.

I didn't say "choose a supported OS", I said "Get the OS you use to be supported." That's your work and your job.

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Well, this is me saying, get Mint supported :wink: Is there something else for me I can do to get it supported? I'd love to.

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Yeah, write the code for Pi-hole that allows it to work. Run the tests to make sure it works. Provide support to users of Mint when it goes wrong.

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Pi-hole needs no work to perform on Mint. Out of the box, bam, done. I ran it from januari to july, mostly 5.0 beta but now 5.0 release, to say it works. So what other tests do we need? The support is not any different than from Ubuntu which you do support. But I will always read and reply on these forums if I can help others. But I truly think you got it, since its no different from Ubuntu from your angle.

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Pull requests are welcomed. If you can provide code so Pi-hole will reliably work with Mint, that would be a great contribution. Plus testing on various platforms.

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That is the thing Dan. I worked from... well I believe we started with Pi-hole in 2017? can that be correct? anyways,, up until today. Only 5.1 made it not work with Mint, due to the "supported OS" check in the installer. But I truly believe this has not changed, I think, from 5.1 on. Its just a matter of Pi-hole accepting Mint as a supported OS on your end.

edit: sorry, i did not notice just now that it was you JFB,my bad.

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I don't run Mint, I can't say one way or another if it works. I know that they have diverged from Ubuntu in many ways and even though I agree with the stance on flatpak, I can't be sure that it will be 1 for 1 identical to Ubuntu.

If you can write the tests that specifically build and run Mint then that's a major step forward.

Bottom line, I'm not adding the support on the word of someone. I need to see it working and continuing to work. You have the directions to run it now, so really, go run it. Nothing is stopping you from running it.

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Dan, we will be more than happy to share our findings so we can get Mint approved. Right now, I'm just not sure about what you need from me. Are there built-in tests we can relay to you?

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Thank you. We will run that, and provide the feedback from that in this topic. I will aim for it to be completed tomorrow, in my country that means friday 17th of july 2020. But meetings might get in the way, either way, check back on this topic later. Even if after the weekend. But nonetheless, thank you Dan, thanks JFB, will speak to you soon. Now going to bed, my friday workday starts in 7 hours.

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There's no real chance of us adding support for a new distro in anything short of a few weeks to months.

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You dont have to. Obviously we worked around this in a matter of minutes. But we just want it to be supported it in the long run, since Pi-hole works great on it, and its just a shame its not yet officially supported.