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.
Welcome to Linux Mint. Once you log in, you will never go back
It’s true. I installed Mint on this computer to dual boot with Windows, expecting a gradual experimental transition away from Windows. But it has been months now, and I haven’t used Windows on this computer at all, other than to just test a couple of things for a minute or so.
Switching to Linux wasn’t perfectly smooth. I’ve definitely run into some problems. But the functionality is there, and the problems are mostly about my lack of experience. I doubt I’ll install Windows on any computer ever again. Windows is getting more and more annoying with nags and ads and bloatware, while Linux continues to slowly but steadily improve.
I’m honestly sad this wasn’t the case for me. Biggest headache was getting my keyboard setup since I didn’t use QWERTY. I was expecting customization like that to be easy/simple since I’ve heard the customizability of Linux systems to be toted before but my god was it a week or more of hell trying to get it to recognize my keyboard layout for the login screen.
And now unfortunately I’m back at it again trying to get it to use my keyboard for the tty session.
if your layout is part of the keymaps (/usr/share/kbd/keymaps depending on distro) you can load it with ‘sudo loadkeys -u awesomelayout’ and make it permanent with ‘localectl’ except on debian and heirs. There it would be ‘sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration’