I don’t play anymore, but I sank over 1500hrs into it. They’ve had several content updates since then, too, so there should be plenty to keep you busy.
Word of advice for starting: focus on opening up every planet in your star chart. After that, you should have access to every mission and event.
There was a post about that exact issue not that long ago, basically, you have to do some networking trickery to get some printers to work.
I agree that there’s a big learning curve, though it’s a nice option if everything you need can be found as a flatpak or appimage.