Why is Home Assistant an operating system and not an application installable through distro packages?

I installed it on Ubuntu server on my raspberry pi 4 and it took a couple months to fall over and become useless.

I've been running their OS since then and it has been absolutely rock solid. It's been 5 or 6 years now, all I do is add more devices occasionally and update it when it occurs to me.

If you have a life and you don't absolutely love tuning your OS for special purposes in ways that are already solved problems, the hass os image is the way to go.