You’re already booting your Linux Mint just fine with the GRUB, right? Assuming you won’t be changing your drives, all you’d need to do is nuke the Windows partition and update your GRUB. You can then reuse that partition for something else. Merging that partition would be time consuming and the devs have said to be risky, but it can be done with a LiveUSB, and I haven’t had any problem myself aside having to wait some time.

I guess it’s just that musl and busybox are not fit for desktop use cases

Can I entertain you with some minimalistic distros? Alpine is the first thing that comes to mind.

It uses busybox which is some kind of minimalistic all-in-one program that includes everything you need to run an OS such as init system and core utilities. And yes, you guessed it, it includes a shell that is a stripped down version of bash. Even the libc is stripped down here, with musl instead of glibc.

Speaking of busybox and musl, there’s also another distro that centers around compiling tiny embedded rootfs image. With this you can configure what (not) to include in the kernel. You can also do the same with busybox, where you can choose to include or exclude utilities.

But honestly, to have something lean while being able to keep up with modern computing, I’d choose Gentoo where you can choose what (not) to put in your programs at compile time.

How did you know… 😉

You do not want to use dash interactively! It is created solely for scripting and not for creature comfort. This means all the stuff you’re probably used to such as line editing and command history will not be available.

At some point, you’d want to ask yourself how heavy is “heavy” and how much stuff are you willing to shed? Do you not need tools such as web browser, media player, or office suite? Are you willing to get rid of desktop environment?

In the extreme, you can remove all the documentations, all the manpages to save space. You can even remove all the localization files, without which stuff would look weird, but would still run.

Further than that, you can even customize your kernel, opting out all the drivers you don’t need, or even some that you could use (e.g. wifi, audio, hardware monitoring). Next, some kernel features that are less essential such as statistics, logging, and debugging, as well as the handling for some network protocols. If you wanna go crazy, you can enable the expert/embedded options and with that you can disable stuff that can be critical (e.g. error reporting, certain IPC feature).

It’s a rabbit hole, really.

Where have you been, the cave?

Linux community have been solving problems together since the dawn of time, despite the bazillion different standards they endorse on their own, they collaborate with each other.

Take a look at KDE & GNOME. They are opposed to each other on the surface level, but they both share countless amount of work. Also MATE, which is a fork of GNOME that is created basically from disagreement of modern GNOME’s direction, still uses a lot of GNOME’s library.

Isn’t LoongArch basically just rebranded MIPS?

I cannot vouch for every distro and every use case out there, but for me, yes you can daily drive without having anything to do with terminal. Some distros have worked a lot ensuring this.

I would recommend to start with Linux Mint.