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.
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.