I have fucked up my computer so many times.

• Accidentally uninstalled the graphical environment, because i didn’t notice my package manager was asking me if i wanted to uninstall 200 packages, along with whatever i actually wanted to uninstall.
• Tested a fork bomb (it worked!)
• Installed a dual boot system incorrectly.
• Installed a dual boot system correctly, but Windows had an update.
• Tried to switch out a working component with Something Really Cool™
• I have spent days troubleshooting an issue that turned out to be a simple syntax error.
• And, while technically not fucking with the computer itself, this deserves a mention; Fucking up the wifi/network SO MANY TIMES.

I have also succeeded with some really cool stuff, but that’s the thing about working with computers; you fail completely, until it works perfectly. This is of course a gross simplification, but it also has a lot of truth to it. There’s just not a lot “this is not great, but it will do”, it either functions or it fails (until you get it working and start fine tuning it for the rest of you life)

Just laugh at the absurdity of the situation when you realize you were just missing a comma in a JSON file, and don’t let it bother you that you didn’t notice before you paid to have your second floor covered in aluminium foil trying to fix the issue.

Try creating a VM in GNOME Boxes (if you use GNOME) or Virt-manager, take a snapshot, so you can easily repeat this process, and break it. Just make it stop functioning. Do it in an interesting way, and look up more ways on the internet.

Be curious, have fun and don’t feel bad about getting sick of that stupid computer, you can come back later and it won’t care that you even left.

Use an operating system like Linux Mint. It’s very simple. Steam can solve the Wine problem, this can be done by adding a new game into your Steam library. Remember that all the distros have certain goals in mind.

You seem to be reaching for pretty advanced solutions – Docker and HA both require you to read a lot of documentation to get started. Bottles is also a powerful and flexible tool, which is the opposite of simple.

What game are you trying to run? If it’s on Steam it should be a no-brainer, otherwise Lutris can simplify a lot of things.

I doubt you actually need Docker for anything, unless you have a specific use case I would just abandon that. For your lights, I would try searching for “home assistant [model/brand of lights]” and see if you can find a setup that someone else has gotten working that you can mostly copy.

Stick to it! I know it seems overwhelming in the beginning, but you will get used to it at first and then get better with time.

Technically, nothing you use in tech is ever really “simple”, there’s tons of complexity hidden from the common user. And whenever parts of that complexity fail or don’t work like the user expects it to, then the superficially simple stuff becomes hard.

Docker and containers are a fairly advanced topic. Don’t think that it’s easy getting into this stuff. Everyone has to learn quite a bit in advance to utilize that.

To play games, you went into the wrong direction when fiddling with wine directly, or even just indirectly by using bottles You COULD do that, but you’ve literally chosen the hardest path to do so. You should use something like HeroicGamesLauncher, Lutris or Steam in order to manage your games, install and launch them fairly easily. These will take care of all the complex stuff behind the scenes for you.

So… you receive plenty of great technical advice, I won’t go there.

I’m sure your title is wrong. I know for a fact that there is plenty of things you did with Linux that looked until then impossible. They do look impossible to most people today. So… yes there are plenty of things you don’t know how to reliably do but you eventually will manage!

I did read a bit from the Greater Good Science Center in Berkeley https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/ and there was a piece specifically on “everytime” or “always” as basically shortcuts during arguments that reframe the situation incorrectly. You surely meant to say “I often get frustrated trying new things on Linux” instead. It sounds like I’m nitpicking, yet simply rephrasing gives a totally new outlook to the situation. We all, literally ALL of us, do struggle when we try something new. We often fail but if we keep on trying, get methodical about it (what was the error message? did I try something similar before? how does it actually work? who could help me? etc) then you are bound to succeed.

So no, you are not the problem. No, you are not an imbecile. No, you do not always fail!

Spot on. Whenever I’m in a rush and something doesn’t work I get so frustrated that I often quit early. Just slow down and take it step by step.

Professional software engineer here. Those things are not easy and even seniors in my field (and myself, ex-top-tech) get tripped up on it and ask for help. Docker and self-hosting is an entire subspecialty (e.g. devops). Be gentle on yourself and don’t put yourself down. By struggling with Linux you are doing immense good for the open source community. “Step by step guides” not likely given the wide array of issues you could run into. If you know a technically strong person, buy them lunch and watch them walk through your problems for an hour. You’ll either learn something or feel validated that they’re struggling too. Keep at it and thanks!

If I were you, I’d make sure to tackle one thing at the time, and set aside some time to figure it out, where the goal is not to for instance play games, but set up a game for play later. That way you can focus on the first part, instead of trying to rush that. So for example, when you are trying to set up Home Assistant, spend time just getting Docker to work first. I’ve fallen into that trap many times before, where I ended up not reading the messages properly because I was impatient and just wanted to get to the end fast. Once you get more familiar with Linux, this stuff gets quicker because more of the steps involved with any task is familiar to you already, and the troubleshooting threads you find on different forums are less Greek.

For specifics:

1. For Docker, when you feel ready to try that again, I’d recommend setting it up together with a GUI, like Portainer. If you follow the official guides to install Docker and then Portainer, you should have a web UI accessible that makes dealing with containers easier. I generally like doing things in the command line, but for containers, I prefer to have a GUI.

2. When it comes to Home Assistant, I’d honestly go for either Home Assistant Green or Yellow from Nabu Casa (you’d support the Open Home Foundation directly this way). If you want to set it up yourself, I’d go the route of a dedicated single board computer, like a Raspberry Pi, and use Home Assistant OS. I tried to set it up as a container as well before, but there are certain limitations you avoid by just running their OS directly on dedicated hardware. It’s been running smoothly for me since I set it up on my Raspberry Pi 4.

3. It is good to learn about Wine and Bottles, but I’d start out with Steam (and Proton), Heroic and Lutris. I’ve had much headaches getting stuff to run properly on Heroic and Lutris, but I think the trick here is to avoid Flatpaks for these sorts of things, because there are many dependencies, and you are dependent on a good permissions setup for Flatpaks. Your mileage may vary though, I’m sure there are plenty of people with painless experiences with Flatpaks here.

Ok, lots of answers focusing on the game, so I think you have plenty of suggestions on what to try there. That being said I have never heard of bottles, I’ve used raw wine and PlayOnLinux before Steam integrated Proton so now I just use that.

For docker it can be daunting, and home assistant is not an easy thing to setup. The thing with docker is that it can be very complex, but you don’t have to worry about the majority of it. I assume you have docker installed, enabled and your user is in the correct groups. Unfortunately Mint/Ubuntu don’t have docker in their normal repos so you probably had to add the docker PPA and install from there. Let’s run a couple of commands to ensure all went well:

sudo systemctl status docker

This should show you the status of the docker daemon, and it should say that it is Active. If you get a no such service type error then docker is not installed, if it’s not shown as active then the daemon is not started and can be done so by running sudo systemctl start docker (and you can replace start with enable for it to happen at boot). If it’s Active then awesome, let’s check that your used can run docker commands, try running this: docker run hello-world if that fails but sudo docker run hello-world works then your user doesn’t have access, you want to add your user to the docker group sudo usermod -aG docker $USER and reboot.

Ok, docker hello world is working, what now? Now, I assume you have some idea of what docker is, but in a (wrong but simple) way you can think of it as virtual machines. Let’s try to run some cool stuff in it, there are two main ways, running a long complicated command, or writing those parameters on a file and running a simple command. This file is called a compose file, and should be named compose.yaml or docker-compose.yaml. let’s try that, create a folder called silverbullet (just because that’s the service we will try, it is a note taking app that I really like) and in there create a file compose.yaml and write the following content there (everything starting with # is a comment I added explaining what that does, and can be removed if you don’t want it):

# This defines all of the services we want to run
services:
  # This is the name of the service, it can be whatever you want
  silverbullet:
    # The image is the actual thing you want to run
    image: ghcr.io/silverbulletmd/silverbullet
    # This tells docker to restart the service if it closed for whatever reason, unless you specifically tell it to stop
    restart: unless-stopped
    # This will set environment variables inside the docker.
    # different services might require different environment variables set
    environment:
      # silver bullet uses SB_USER environment variable to set user/password for the main account. We're setting user to admin and password to 123 here
      - SB_USER=admin:123
    # This maps outside folders to inside folders so that your docker container can access them
    volumes:
      # Here we're telling it that the ./data folder should be accessible in the /space folder inside the docker
      # silver bullet stores stuff in the /space folder, so by mapping it to the ./data folder we can keep that data between runs
      - ./data:/space
    # This tells docker to map ports from the inside to your host machine, this allows you to access the docker container as if it were running on your machine
    ports:
      # This tells it to map the internal port 3000 to the external port 5000, so accessing http://localhost:5000/ from your machine will in fact access the same as http://localhost:3000/ inside docker
      # Silver bullet runs on port 3000, so we need to expose that port
      - 5000:3000

Uff, that was a lot, but we’re done, now just run docker compose up -d (up to start -d to run as a daemon, i.e. in the background) and you should be able to access http://localhost:5000/ and get to Silver bullet logging in with admin 123, then if you write about something you will see files appearing in the silverbullet/data folder.

I know that this was a lot in one go, but I chose Silver bullet because it touches all of the most common stuff you’ll need and it’s easy to get going.

Good luck with your self hosting journey, and don’t hesitate to ask if you have any questions.

I’ve been daily driving Linux since the early 00s and docker confounds me too, especially the networking. I’m not familiar with bottles. I just play all my games on steam and it’s seamless.

I opted to install a game, fail.

I don’t remember ever getting anything to work in Bottles. PlayonLinux is much better (for any sort of app, not just games).

Docker is annoying as fuck. Don’t blame yourself for not getting it to work.

Bottles is also annoying as fuck.

These two things aren’t really a sign of your skill. The first one (docker) is unfortunately super prevalent these days because of memes and bandwagoning. It has its use, but it’s also used in many places where it’s not needed without providing a comparable means to run software without docker. It sucks how newbies who are just trying to get a program to work all of a sudden have to learn a bunch of docker bullshit. Just another layer of crap to make things harder to learn while the creators jerk themselves off.

Running Windows games on Linux will always be a pain in the ass because you’re trying to run complicated, sometimes very old, software that straight up was not designed to be run on Linux! I’ve been doing it for years and it’s still a pain in the ass. Some games only work with Lutris, some require very specific settings. It’s all a mess and I don’t ever expect a Windows game to work unless I’ve gotten it to work recently and played it a bunch.

It’s not your fault. It’s not Linux’s fault. This is the price that we all collectively get to pay for not doing things right the first time.

In short, don’t lose hope. You’re doing fine.

People love to go around talking about how easy Linux and self-hosting and Home Assistant are but they aren’t.

I ran Home Assistant for about 3 years. It’s incredibly powerful but it’s also incredibly complicated. After the 3rd time it offed itself I just put all the mechanical shit back in and deleted it.

Linux I kinda gave up on. It’s awesome playing Steam games on my Steam Machine but even just playing GOG or Epic games it’s 50/50. I still have Linux on my laptop but I simply can’t use it for a lot of stuff so I mostly use an old iMac.

So yeah, it’s not just you. It’s mostly fucking software engineers and developers constantly telling you how “easy” this shit is.

Yeah I feel Linux has a lot of dead ends. Its easy to follow the wrong path. My saving grace has always been that once you get things working, you know how you did it and it likely won’t change much.

So really its a big search, but once you hit a steady state it really feels like home.