I'm of the "host or you're toast" philosophy so I'm trying to get a working instance of CiviCRM on either a virtual Ubuntu 20.04 instance on a local qemu/kvm server or personal laptop. Usual LAMP with WordPress working. Web install fails on both with the same error about "grouping".

It's a nice refresher course in SQL, etc.

But what should I try to do next to get a working instance?
Drop in mariaDB, dump MySQL?

Rip out apt installed CiviCRM. Download the CiviCRM tar.gz to get the latest version?

Forget the web install. Use CLI cv method?