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.
To get used to the terminal, I suggest using Oh my zsh with zsh-autosuggestions + zsh-syntax-highlighting plugin. Setup link
There's always Fish the Friendly Interactive Shell as well
Please don't use Oh-My-ZSH. Just manually get the .zsh files instead.
And
fish
is bloat and doesn't run your scripts.