Linux

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is no failure, only data.

Before using docker u need learn how to use it,it would be problem no matter what os if u don't know how to use this technology.Bottles yes or portproton,storage scan u can use gnome disk storage analyzer