Turns out the reply in my thread telling me the best way to combat not caring about Linux is to care about Linux was absolutely correct.
I picked up a laptop, installed Linux Mint Cinnamon, and I'm already obsessed. I haven't had this much fun with a PC in a long time and it's just a cheapo Dell Inspiron 3520.
Yeah. Timeshift is good. Fortunately, it is part of the default Mint install, and the Mint 'getting started' instructions say to set it up.
I personally needed Timeshift on my second week of using Mint. What happened was that I was that I saw some setting somewhere for linking a google calendar to the calendar app or something like that; and I thought "I don't really want to see any mention of Google anywhere in the OS, even in a setting that I can just not use"; so I uninstalled the thing that lets you link those accounts... what I didn't realise is that uninstalling that also uninstalled a heap of critical parts of the Gnome desktop. So after restarting, I had no desktop or anything.
Fortunately, Timeshift is super easy to use, and I fixed it in a few minutes. Easy to break, easy to fix.
Haha, I previously broke my mint install multiple times due to nvidia drivers... Now I just have timeshift backup to an internal hdd two times a day, just in case. I use Artix btw.