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.
I’m kind of a generalist in terms of interest in the IT sector and have a surface level understanding of most things (professionally I’m just a fullstack webdev), one big crater in my knowledge is about how drivers work, really want to do something like this in my free time (next year because I’m pretty much drowning in tasks now). The closest (but still pretty far) to this I’ve done is write a small service that increases / decreases volume through pulseaudio based on ACPI events (windows tablet volume buttons weren’t working properly under linux).
Reading my comment back, excuse my writing style (too many brackets lol).
Good luck with that! It’s basically just playing around with memory and some constructs inside it. The kernel docs for Linux suck balls though if you have no idea about that stuff and/or are new to kernel-level programming. That’s where I learned to love the Microsoft documentation.
Maybe pick up a microcontroller and write a driver for so a device can connect with it? I had great fun writing an Hitachi LCD driver for the Arduino. You can get an arduino for like 5 bucks on aliexpress or you buy an even cheaper MC and play around with that.