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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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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.

Docker won’t make much sense if you don’t understand the underlying Linux systems and/or applications.

It’s similar with Wine and Bottles. If you don’t get what’s in the bottle, then running the bottle won’t make sense.

Find tasks that run on the native OS. learn to manage Linux itself. skip containers, Snap, virtual machines, etc.

try running a web server using httpd or something.

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.

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.

A thing about Linux is that there’s usually like 10 different ways to accomplish something. If you hit a dead end in terms of your ability or tolerance for frustration… just go back to square one and find a different approach. For games, I recommend starting with Steam.