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.