The official account of the Milwaukee pianist www.joshuachandra.com
I don’t actually know if anything you try in the test state saves to the flash drive, sorry! But I know that if you try it, then shut down the PC and boot it with the drive removed, it will return to your copy of Windows like nothing happened since the last time you were on Windows.
I don’t understand what you mean by “Mint version” and “distro version”; they’re the same thing, I think.
Yes, you can try a copy of Linux from a USB flash drive and then shut down the computer, pull out the drive, and boot right back into Windows as if nothing had ever happened. The installation process is typically a desktop icon on the Linux distro; if you don’t touch that icon, then it’s all temporary. Glad to be of help!
Just checking: are you aware that you can try Linux on your machine without installing it? You can use Balena Etcher to write a disc image (.ISO) to any flash drive (that’s the one catch: you must own a flash drive), and plug it in, have the PC boot from the flash drive instead of its own internal parts, and test-drive Linux entirely in it.
Alternatively, you could run it in a virtual machine via Oracle VirtualBox, which is free, last I checked.
Maybe they’re interested in finding exactly what the public’s critical breaking point is. Without gauging exactly what the demand (for distraction-free, private use) is, they cannot optimize their sales. They sure lost big with France, but we’ll see who else follows suit…