First, I would strongly recommend creating a bootable USB drive and booting to it instead of using a VM if you are looking to test hardware compatibility and drivers. If this isn’t something you are familiar with, just let me know and I can try to point you in the direction of some useful resources. The virtualization pass through can add an additional set of headaches that is not representative of what your experience will be after installation, and you can reuse the bootable drive later if you decide to go forward with installation. There is no risk to the data you currently have on the machine, unless you decide to do the installation process or otherwise deliberately muck about.

It is also possible a suitable driver is already in the kernel for this device, since it looks to be a fairly standard USB Wifi adapter, in which case you might learn that you don’t need to mess with driver installation at all. In my experience, I have only needed drivers for Nvidia hardware, and when I have been trying to do something unusual with AMD graphics hardware, but I also have never heard of the company for your particular adapter, so your mileage may vary. Regardless, if you are continuing with your VM testing, make sure all of your USB pass through is being handled correctly so you aren’t barking up the wrong tree.

As far as the drivers themselves, it looks like if you go a few directories down, there is some documentation, as in a Readme.txt that just contains a list of changes made to the software in various versions. I think if you dig down in the extracted zip file into WIFI-FE-2(Other Driver)/Linux Driver/DPA_MT7601U_LinuxSTA_3.0.0.3_20130313/ you’ll be in more or less the right place. From there I think on the command line you can just do make and things should get compiled by your system toolchain, and then when that hopefully finishes successfully you can do sudo make install to get everything where it needs to go. Those are fairly standard steps for installing from source on Linux, though they are typically preceded by a command to Automake or CMake to fully configure the build system. I don’t see any evidence of those tools being present, but that’s something to check out if the commands I mentioned throw up an error of some kind.

Anyway, good luck! I hope that Linux on the desktop impresses and you make the switch, but if not I hope you at least get the chance to learn more about your system. And don’t hesitate to respond here or in a DM if you have other questions!

Please run lsusb and post the output of the line where your wireless chip is here.

Did you install the linux-firmware and/or firmware-ralink package?

You might be able to just search the internet for the vendor/device ID (the 8 hex digits looking like 00a0:ab67) and “linux mint” and find a guide on how to run this.

If you install lshw and do lshw -c net you might also gain valuable information about your network hardware.