Don’t feel bad, I’ve used Linux since 1995 and don’t have enough skills to use Bottles.

I do however game a lot, using mainly Steam and Heroic. You can try to start there.

@Squizzy you’re not getting the full Linux experience if you can install everything on the first try, lol. sad but true

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.

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).

I feel your pain… I recently tried very diligently to install Immich with docker after reading and watching several tutorials that claim it takea 5 minutes and its super easy… Failed… Like 5 times…

For some advice, I use heroic game launcher to install non steam games. Bottles kind of sucks IMO.

I too am very cautious of getting stuck with Linux. I try to be sure I’m not doing things the hard way. I have found easy distros and easy ways to do most things in Linux despite many people suggesting I do it the IT pro way that they do. Usually because they haven’t investigated easy ways for non IT users. They mean well, but don’t know about usability or if there us an easy way.

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.

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.

Id suggest watching the videoes of LearnLinuxTV on Youtube, he covers linux on a very basic level, hes got loads of videos on a vast amount of different topics.

Learning Linux can be difficult man. Even after using Linux as my daily driver for a couple years, I still feel like I know nothing man.

Real talk, start with dead simple stuff and go from there. Install a package from a package manager, update your system, make a file with terminal.

You dont have to be a wizzard man, docker shit is still over my head.

which distro and hardware config? Can’t speak to docker as I don’t use that any more, I’ve yet to get stuck into homeassistant, but games are just click and run on most distros with steam?

Portainer helped me get my head around docker images. And docker hub sometimes has the steps to configure the container, and sometimes not; many assume everyone knows how to pass bind or volume mounts and bridge or host network stuff.

I played with portainer a while to visually see what thing do.

Then it led to command line and yaml configs stuff after that. Its a learning process.