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I just downloaded rufus and a mint iso, here’s a couple screen grabs.
Launch rufus, and plug in your usb stick, it should show up under device.
From there click select on the right side. Browse to where you have the ISO you got from the linux mint website and select it.
Once you get back to the other screen hit start.
You shouldn’t need to mess with any settings unless you are using secure boot.
Once that’s done, you should restart and boot from the USB stick. Depending on the model of your laptop there are different methods to get into the bios to change the settings to allow booting from usb. If it goes into grub mode it will look like a command prompt with a few selections. Just hit enter on the first option and it will boot into the live usb.
Once you are in the live usb mode, it’s basically all gui to install, test, etc.
Nowadays the terminal stuff is not really needed for basic use, so you should be able to get spun up pretty easy.
I would check out some of the add-ons for Firefox, Chrome, etc. that disable HTML5 auto play. Might give you an idea of where to start in blocking the pushstate function which is what is used to change the URL as far as I know.