I just want something as a proof of concept that this can be for me. I am aware I am the problem.
But everything is wildly difficult for me. I pulled back from docker after realising it was above my skillset, I just want to try home assisstant with a few lights but fair enough it is beyond me.
I opted to install a game, fail. Learn about wine and bottles. Start a bottle and get told I only have 8gb free in directory, I cannot for the life of me see where it is getting that from.
Please god someone tell me there is a step by step for the fucking imbeciles out there on where to start!?
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:
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.
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.
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.