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!?

  • CapillaryUpgrade@lemmy.sdf.org
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    5 days ago

    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.

    • v01dworks@piefed.social
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      1 day ago

      My personal favorite was the time I accidentally gave every file in the system full permissions because I fucked up somehow with writing a command and recursively changed them on EVERYTHING instead of just the one directory I wanted to change

      I was just trying to get a game from Origin (I think?) to work and I don’t remember what lead me to trying this but basically I just had to reinstall Linux

    • Valso@lemmy.ml
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      4 days ago

      Hahahahahahaha, you’re a… tech “miracle”! For the 10 years with Linux I’ve never uninstalled the DE by accident or otherwise, or any of the other problems you mentioned. I have fucked up my computer only once but I did it on purpose - to see what will happen. I had already created a clonezilla backup of a working system, so I was free to experiment and… I decided to uninstall both kernels (rolling and LTS) and reboot. There was no kernel panic because there was no kernel to begin with. 😆

  • verdigris@lemmy.ml
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    5 days ago

    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.

  • PastafARRian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 days ago

    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!

  • kyub@discuss.tchncs.de
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    6 days ago

    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.

    • Squizzy@lemmy.worldOP
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      5 days ago

      Thanks, its heartening to know its fairly advamced stuff and Im not an idiot.

      As for the gaming, I have seen some success last night. I managed to run the setup successfully in steam… but I dont know where the installed game is now to run it 😂

      Bit by bit

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    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.

    • Random Dent@lemmy.ml
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      3 days ago

      I consider myself to be pretty okay at Linux - I’m no pro but I’ve been daily driving Linux for 10+ years, can troubleshoot most things, I’ve installed Arch from scratch without the installer script, I can setup and maintain NixOS without much trouble, I can automate stuff with Bash etc. But I still don’t understand Docker even a little bit. I don’t know why but I just can’t get my head around it. I’ve even searched for the “Explain Docker to me as if I’m five years old” type of guides and I still just bounce of it.

      • Theoriginalthon@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        You are not on your own, I just can’t get my head around docker either on paper it make sense but it seems just enough of a difference to melt something in my brain. Added to the fact that docker fucks around with firewall rules thinking it’s the only thing of importance on the system, breaking KVM networking in the process. It’s just not something I trust to play well with others.

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    7 days ago

    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.

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    6 days ago

    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!

    • Squizzy@lemmy.worldOP
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      5 days ago

      Appreciate this, its absolutely right. It was a moment of frustration for sure, not ready to trow the baby out with the bathwater just yet.

  • downhomechunk@midwest.social
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    6 days ago

    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.

    • Random Dent@lemmy.ml
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      I’ve gotten exactly one thing to ever run properly in Bottles, and that was an accident lol. Which is weird because I can get things to run in Wine no problem, and I assumed that Bottles would be easier since it’s essentially just Wine with a GUI. But for reasons that elude me, everything I throw at Bottles just doesn’t work. I’ve even taken things that work perfectly well in Wine and setting them up in Bottles with the exact same settings (as far as I can tell) and they just don’t. work. I assume it’s something I’m doing wrong, but there’s no real reason to spend the time to figure it out when Wine is right there getting the job done.

  • pebbles@sh.itjust.works
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    6 days ago

    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.

    • bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works
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      6 days ago

      This right here. Once you figure shit out youre DONE. Likely in 10 or more years those commands will still work. No bullshit windows updates wrecking functionality.

      I haven’t touched windows in 3 months now and its been great. Linux is way easier even than 5 years ago

    • Squizzy@lemmy.worldOP
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      6 days ago

      I feel its the inverse of windows in that sense, maybe I am just used to it and its ways but if I st out to do something it just id achievable…mind you Inwouldnt be doing anything complicated but even te mundane is complicated here.

      • pebbles@sh.itjust.works
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        6 days ago

        I am young and have a computer science degree, and I still struggle at times. I get it.

        For games, I’d try to install steam and run them through steam if thats how you’d normally do it on windows. Then for me the main setting to play with (on a game by game basis) is setting the game to use proton (in the compatibility settings of the game) and whether or not to use steam input for controller support.

        If you are trying to install a non steam game, maybe look into lutris. Though I’m on the techy side, and I hear a lot of people like heroic game launcher on the less techy side.

        Good luck. I think it’s fair to run out of energy while trying get the right combo, but if ya stick to it I’m confident you’ll find the set up that works for you.

        • Squizzy@lemmy.worldOP
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          6 days ago

          I actually did get lutris perfect last time for what I wanted it, this time is different.

          I had steam told to use proton in general compatibility settings but I just copped that on a per program basis it was off for some reason so I selected it and it progressed to install which is great. Unfortunately it did stall in the same place as bottles, by claiming there was only 8GB free of a necessary 60 so I have to figure out why that keeps cropping up. My only drives are 300gb free ssd and 1tb free hdd.

          Thanks for the confidence though, much appreciated.

            • Squizzy@lemmy.worldOP
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              5 days ago

              I dont think so, I went and checked my drives, everything was fine and visible. ~900gb free and two volumes of a few mbs. Thought Inwould format and now I have to learn about mounting again because I can see it in directories but cant in disk analyser.

          • verdigris@lemmy.ml
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            5 days ago

            What might have happened: if you select a global compatibility tool (proton) in the steam settings, it will use that for all non-native games. But any games that ship a Linux binary will still use that instead of Proton. This is generally good, but some devs ship a Linux binary that’s actually not as good as the Windows one. I’ve seen some games not update the Linux binary until much later than the Windows one, so the Linux one is out of date, and for some games it’s just flat-out broken. In these cases you can manually select a Proton version for that game, which will force it to run the Windows binary.

  • ian@feddit.uk
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    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.

  • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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    7 days ago

    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.

  • flexacarn@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    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.

  • cyberwolfie@lemmy.ml
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    6 days ago

    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.

  • eelectricshock@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    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.