Tempted to switch to Mint 20.3 or net install Debian 11 base with Cinnamon DE

[antikythera]

As much as I appreciate the work Clem and the team are doing to re-base Cinnamon and the fact it will be a bumpy ride for a while there's some issues I am not willing to put up with at present.

Therefore I may go down the route of installing Mint 20.3 or Debian 11 instead with Cinnamon via network install. I have tried forcing the Debian versions of the Cinnamon 4.8 desktop packages and their dependencies but apt won't process the command due to un-resolvable issues. I do however have a foxclone backup taken the day before the update, so it may be easier to switch that or blacklist the packages for further updates. I will try it and see.

[t42]

There is no problem to install Cinnamon from netinst.iso, just select Cinnamon on the DE page. This image can be recommended (source page):
firmware-11.4.0-amd64-netinst.iso

[antikythera]

I have done it before using the non-free netinstall (easier than dealing with firmware side loading for network adapters) and found it a very strange configuration. I don't really like their meta package for Cinnamon as it has some very random choices in for what is needed to run Cinnamon as compared to what Clem specifies. It drags in far too many GNOME packages that to me are non-essential.

I'd probably install the base system instead and paste the contents of LMDE5 ISO's package list into apt removing the few packages that are exclusive to mint repo.

[antikythera]

Update on this, I used foxclone to restore the image I took prior to letting the Ryzen system install the new build of Cinnamon and have marked all the Cinnamon packages as never update in Mint Update. It seems to have worked and there's no apparent stability issues as all the other updates since 1st August applied successfully and it rebooted back into Cinnamon 5.2.7 fine. I'll give it a week and if nothing goes pair shaped I will do the same with my older system too.