Linux

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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).

There is no failure, only data.

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.