(U)EFI, rEFInd, Grub, etc

Finally gotten to the point where I am putting OSes on my new build (took 6 months to build - don’t ask; stressful work/life balance, and home life is difficult to say the least - politics; consistent consumption of QAnon videos, by someone in my house, with no areas available to build away from that person - had to build in the middle of the night after work).

Anyway, I am dual-booting Windows 10 and Linux Mint 20.2 but I don’t like the grub2 interface, I prefer a GUI so I installed rEFInd. That’s working fine; I can boot into both the Windows bootloader and grub from rEFInd. My questions start with cleaning up rEFInd. I know I can use pre-made themes, but the theme’s pre-included refind config files are definitely going to need to by modified. Does anybody know of a thorough guide on what settings do what?

Secondly, to prevent me needing to double select my Mint install (once in refind and then again in grub), how do I pre-select Mint in grub and auto boot after a 2 second delay?

Thirdly, when I boot into Windows using grub I get an Asus logo (my motherboard) above the spinning Windows loading icon. When I boot from the Windows option in refind, I get the Windows logo above the spinning loading icon. I’m assuming grub is somehow passing off a parameter to the Windows bootloader to get the Asus logo? What parameters would I need to pass via refind to do the same.

Fourthly, I would like to dive more deeply into the inner working of (U)EFI; does anyone know of guides online or books heavily devoted to the topic?

Setting a default entry in grub.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB/Tips_and_tricks#Changing_the_default_menu_entry

To hide grub unless you want to see it.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/GRUB/Tips_and_tricks#Hide_GRUB_unless_the_Shift_key_is_held_down
You could also just remove grub and have rEFInd boot Mint directly. That may be Mint specific though.

The boot logo thing could be a bug. I don’t know about that except that uEFI could access the image at anytime.

In order to learn about uEFI, I would go to the source, unless you mean on how your distribution deals with uEFI?
https://uefi.org/

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