If you happen to care, what you were doing with the program Rufus was creating a “bootable media”. Think back in the day when you had to buy a Windows CD and insert that to install or update Windows. This is kind of the evolution of that. An operating system installer can be loaded into a thumb drive (some utilities even let you put many on one drive, and then you can choose between them) and then you tell your computer to read from the USB drive first (which you did via the BIOS boot menu configuration) and instead of booting up your installed Windows, it gives you the option of installing whatever is on your USB drive.
This is fortunately often a pretty painless process, creating the USB boot loaders isn’t hard, and virtually every single Linux distro out there can be installed in this way.
Glad you’re enjoying Mint, and excellent choice for a new Linux user. If you like it, you’ll never need to change to anything else.
I’ve been using fedora since 2016 and love it. Switched to the KDE spin 2-3 years ago and love that even more. It’s the right balance of fully-fledged OS while still letting me tinker. I don’t have time for Arch-level setup BS, and distros like Mint and Manjaro and Ubuntu felt too clunky and restrictive to me.
I’m a techy and a tinkerer. I run Linux on a lot of machines and I self host some stuff, and I also mod and tune my car.
I keep a windows laptop on hand that at this point I literally only use for tuning software. If something goes wrong with the car I don’t want to go through trying to fuck with booting a niche engine tune program in Wine on a Linux machine with an OS that may or may not even recognize the OBD device needed to flash the tune. Too many places for things to go wrong and the end result is a car I can’t drive.
Unless you’re very comfortable with having your car unusable for long periods of time while you troubleshoot things, I’d highly recommend having a windows laptop for car tuning.
Ok so if you read the second thing I said, it’s that it should be illegal to lay off some people while giving raises to others.
The idea is, sometimes, you don’t have profit and do have to lay people off. And that can be ok. If you have enough revenue to somehow still give your executive raises, that is fucked up.
Well it doesn’t help that our health insurance is directly tied to our employment. So if you get laid off then need a prescription you’re right fucked.