Mac mini (Late 2012) Running Big Sur

This was even easier than the MacBook Air. Picked up a cheap Mac Mini (Late 2012, Macmini6,1) on eBay to use at the office, retiring an increasingly flaky High Sierra box. Specs:

• Dual-Core Intel Core i5 2.5 GHz (i5-3210M) (Ivy Bridge)
• 16GB RAM (2x 8GB DDR3 1600 MHz SODIMMs)
• Crucial M4 256GB SATAIII SSD (M4-CT256M4SSD1) (this might be getting a little long in the tooth...)
• Bluetooth 4.0
• Gigabit Ethernet (Broadcom BCM5701)
• FireWire 800
• Intel HD Graphics 4000 GPU (Metal Family: Supported, Metal GPUFamily macOS 1)
• Thunderbolt (Speed: Up to 10 Gb/s x2)
• USB 3.0
• AirPort Extreme WiFi (Broadcom BCM43xx) 802.11 a/b/g/n

I used the same macOS Installer USB I created for the MacBook Air, and, on the mini (which arrived with a fresh install of Catalina), ran the OpenCore Legacy Patcher 4.3 (a simple operation of building and installing OpenCore on to the EFI partition on the USB stick), rebooted with Option held down, and ran the installer. It ran unattended, rebooting several times, and when I came in to check on it about an hour later it was waiting at the Big Sur login screen. Ran the OpenCore Legacy Patcher again to build and install onto the EFI partition on the internal SSD and that was it. Because the HD 4000 GPU is metal-compatible, there was nothing to be done vis-a-vis the Post Install Root Patch.