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.
And if you plan on trying different distributions, use Ventoy. It will create a bootable USB memory stick that you can copy your various ISO files to. When booting from it, you can then select which ISO to boot. Saves you from overwriting the same memory stick time and time again. Or having multiple memory sticks, one for each ISO.