I heard Mint is supposed to be the simplest distro to get started with but my experience so far (following the setup guide on the website) has been:
- Download ISO
- Check ISO (seemed fine)
- Burn image… crash
- Burn image in administrator mode
- Boot from USB via BIOS… crash
- Boot from USB via Bios in safe mode
- Download multimedia codecs… crash
- Not download multimedia codecs… also crash?
And that’s where I am presently, it runs fine off the USB albeit a bit slow, and I know its connected to the internet because I can browse lemmy on it and make annoying posts on the Linux community. I knew Linux was going to be more work than windows but this feels like a ridiculous level of effort right out of the gate, I worry that even if I somehow get it running I’ll spend 10x more time fixing it than actually using it.
That doesn’t mean that your laptop hasn’t developed a problem in the meantime. As someone else said, you had problems before you ever tried booting from the USB stick, so before Mint ever ran on the hardware. It looks like a hardware issue.