Sudo docker will do the trick. Docker does some networking shit so it needs admin privileges

Don't give up, don't listen to goober 🤓 itt telling you to read manpages that shit is worthless.

Ok, so I don't know the specifics, this might not be entirely accurate, but this is a general step-by-step guide for Debian based distros like Mint.

Install docker

The first thing you need to do is install docker, this can be done via whatever GUI you use for a package manager or via the terminal using sudo apt install docker (I'm not sure docker is the name of the package, I'm just guessing, you can do an apt search docker to see what's available)

Add yourself to dockers

This is likely not needed on Mint, but just in case your user should be in the docker group, i.e. run sudo gpasswd -a docker. I'm almost sure Mint does this by default.

Enable docker systemd

This also might not be needed, again I'm almost sure Mint does this for you when you install docker, but just in case the command is sudo systemctl enable docker

Reboot

Because there have been changes to your user groups you need to relogin, easier to reboot.

use docker

Now you have a system with docker, you can test this by running the following command docker run hello-world, if you see a bunch of text that contains "Hello from docker" docker is working.

setup a docker-compose file

Create a folder, and in that folder create a text file called docker-compose.yaml in that file. This file will tell docker what you want to run, for example to have Nextcloud (which is an awesome self-hosted drive alternative. I'm not going to teach you the specific services you want, you can figure those out by looking at their page on the linuxserver page or something) you can look here https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/nextcloud on how to write your docker-compose file, for example you could write:

services:
  nextcloud:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/nextcloud:latest
    container_name: nextcloud
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Etc/UTC
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
      - ./data:/data
    ports:
      - 8080:80
      - 443:443
    restart: unless-stopped

Then open a terminal on that folder and run docker compose up -d after that is done open a browser and go to http://localhost:8080 and begin using Nextcloud.

Try a more managed and out-of-the-box solution first, then work your way down to the commandline. I'd recommend one of the NAS solutions like openmediavault (if they still do docker) or https://cockpit-project.org/

or Docker for Desktop or podman.io

(maybe lxc containers with proxmox or unraid)

how the hell do I find docker

Type “docker” in terminal and hit enter. Since it’s installed, your system will likely recognize it as a command and populate a help menu for you. You’ll want to visit docker’s website for a full manual.

OP: chatGPT is your personal Linux guru. Pretend it's your friend who knows everything about linux and tell it what you want to achieve.

Paste in any error messages and it will tell you how to fix them. Just make sure it knows what distro you're using first.

That's how I learned to use docker :)

Docker can be really confusing, but IMO being able to add and remove software without having changes made throughout your system is well worth the effort.

There are distributions like CasaOS and TrueNAS Scale that try to offer at least a bit of graphical guidance for some popular apps.

Otherwise, you're jumping into the server pool, Windows doesn't really work that different from Linux in that area (in the sense that you can just click on things).