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.
It really comes down to apps.
The only flag you mentioned that caught my attention was Word and Word templates. I’ve not tried Word templates.
I figure your options are either Libre Office or something cloud based, eg, Google Docs.
One thing you could try is to set up a VM or boot a live CD (USB) and try on the things that most concern you.
If word is a sticking point office365 exists too.
For more complex documents, O365 does not work well, sadly.
For simple documents it also doesn’t work well, but at least it’s expensive and slow so it’s got that going for it.