In the unstable ISO, the “Options” submenu has a “Disable display-manager” entry which also disables plymouth. On stable, it’s in the “HiDPI and accessibility” submenu and it doesn’t disable plymouth.
I think NetworkManager in the minimal ISO is probably a good idea.
It seems to me that there are a lot of UEFI firmwares out there that are just… painfully buggy. I’ve been toying with revamping the ISO to be more firmware-friendly by formatting more similarly to Ubuntu’s ISO9660 formatting and switching to systemd-boot for UEFI and limine for legacy BIOS. Grub and syslinux just don’t really cut it these days IMO. Unfortunately I don’t have any of the hardware with the buggy firmware I’m trying to fix for, e.g. some of the stuff mentioned in various reports in this thread.
This is an option, now that my specialisations PR is merged. I think we probably need to basically eliminate the minimal profile it uses though, since it makes some really strange and unpleasant choices in the name of saving a small amount of space. Regardless, I’m not sure how much value this adds over the “Disable display-manager” boot entry mentioned before; but maybe we could have this specialisation instead of that.