My issue was definitely not related to plymouth, since this package was not installed/present at any point. But thank you nevertheless for mentioning it.
I managed to fix my issue like this:
- I downloaded Solus Budgie 4.7 from here and made a boot-USB-drive.
- Booted from that and ran the installer to install Solus on my SSD/NVMe (by the way, in case it matters: I selected the first boot-entry, not the "nomodeset nvidia" entry)
- Once the installer was done, rebooted my system and booted from the SSD
- Logged in, opened a terminal and did
sudo eopkg ur then sudo eopgk up
- Once that was done, I did NOT immediately reboot, but instead added the Nvidia drivers:
sudo eopgk install nvidia-glx-driver-current nvidia-glx-driver-32bit
- Reboot
- Then I did
sudo eopkg ur then sudo eopgk up again, since there were more updates available
- Reboot
In between those steps, just to be sure (since it was mentioned in this thread), I checked with sudo eopkg list-installed | grep -i plymouth to see if this package would show up at any point. It didn't.
At some point, when I was about to enter things into the terminal, my keyboard and mouse stopped working for some reason (I immediately noticed it before even starting to type, because the backlight on my keyboard turned off). Unplugging and re-plugging the devices didn't help.
I had to grab a second keyboard I had laying around, crossed my fingers and plugged it to a front-USB-plug. That worked. After the next round of updates, everything was fine again.
Now I have a fully updated system, no flickering, no freezing, no black screen and the current Nvidia drivers are installed.
I can only assume that there's something in the Solus Budgie 4.8 installer or image that led to issues on my system, so I'm glad the old image is still there.
