I use what they recommend: I installed Home Assistant Operating System on a Raspberry PI 3. Which still means there's an OS and there's HA Core.

> Home Assistant Operating System: Minimal Operating System optimized to power Home Assistant. It comes with Supervisor to manage Home Assistant Core and Add-ons. Recommended installation method.

I tried on purpose to do everything as 'basic' as possible because I don't want to spend time making sure it keeps working.