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.
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’