My set-up of Linux Mint and GRUB seems to have messed up my Windows drive, as now I can't boot from it directly anymore, but only by going through GRUB first, and I want to uninstall Linux. How would I go about figuring out the issue and fixing it?
As for why I want to uninstall Linux, it's mostly two reasons 1: My father gave me a spare HDD he had since I'm not a fan of buying things when you already have them. Turns out (coming from a teen who's been booting from an SSD for most of their life) HDDs are slow, too slow for my liking. 2: Linux, Mint at least, feels incomplete, sort of like a tech demo, with extremely limited support for anything that wasn't directly intended by the developers. The concept of having to compile something yourself is basically foreign to me, and the few times I had to do it in Windows I could easily find a way around it. Plus having to basically rely on a built-in app database/store to easily install apps... Kinda stinks to me, and not being able to simply download an installer from a website and having the program, whatever program, up and running reliably within a minute, the concept seems ridiculous... I'm not sure, I could be really spoiled by Windows 10, or simply too used to it.
TLDR: HDDs are slower than I thought and Linux doesn't seem good for people like me
Ps: Yes, I know, mass storage is "super cheap" nowdays, but for someone who only reliably gets money during their birthday and Christmas, €20 may as well be €200
Also, I am pretty sure that I will come back to Linux in the future once Windows has devolved to the point of being garbage (which from what I've seen might be very close) and I've gotten better at general computer usage (which may be close too since I'm starting to familiarize myself with CLIs)
I haven't been dual booting for some time now but I think this should help you put Windows on the menu in GRUB.
Usually Linux installation is only the the base system (in case of Mint much more than that, since it installs X/Wayland and a DM by default) because there's no point in installing everything. Packages of a distro offer much more than Windows. The idea is that after you have your system up, you can install the software you want.
In Mint and being new, I think you shouldn't need to compile anything.
Package manager is the support you are looking for
Thing is, this is not a store. This is not a place that random people put stuff. Distro package manager is the place where people that maintain the distribution (compile things for you in a way that will work with libraries from the other packages in the repo) put the packages and define what needs what.
Interesting part is that I feel exactly the other way round. If package comes from the repo, then this is something official. If I'm looking for ssh client, I type a package manager search for ssh and I know that packages downloaded this way should just work. While in Windows I always have a small panic attack that I'm downloading something shady when putty page has an address like it has