I haven’t been dual booting for some time now but I think this should help you put Windows on the menu in GRUB.
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
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
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
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