First thoughts - Add Software Package Manager

[mdavies5]

Have played with Cinnamon Patience for a few days and must congratulate the teams on a great product. Installation was no problem on USB3 stick and it works reasonably fast in this environment. Also everything worked out of the box with no bugs to report. The range of software was extensive but I preferred to change a few packages. This raised the first little anomaly; there is no package manager. I installed Synaptic using apt-get but many new users would not know this. Would be nice if it was included by default, thus also solving the absence of any update functionality.
Cinnamon worked fine with the default theme. I am not a lover of dark themes so I downloaded some others and selected Void which works fine. SOme of the other Themes did not work well as dialogs were missing. For example, if you go to'Effects' in Settings there are 4 options listed but no no checkboxes or switches are visible but you can click on the blank space at the end of each label. Similarly the text input box is missing when entering a password for sudo but you can type the password. This is clearly a problem with  Cinnamon Themes not Siduction.
Another oddity and I wonder if anybody has encountered it: I can boot from the USB stick by using F12 (on Toshiba) but , if I include Siduction on my main grub menu (on sda), I get a message that the UUID cannot be found. It seems that the USB stick is not detected by the system before grub runs. Other distros boot ok with this method.

[devil]

Let me answer your first question:
Synaptic is absent by our decision. The reason is that dist-upgrading  with synaptic in sid will eventually lead to a broken system. We prefer apt for the job. Of course you can install what you like, but we don't want to ship stuff with the potential for havoc.

[mdavies5]

Thanks, good point. I forgot I was dealing with the sid version.