Just to wrap this one up with something much more in-line with the original spirit of this thread, there are a few things I never quite managed to implement that seemed like a good idea from Average Linux User's "21 Suggestions":
https://averagelinuxuser.com/after-installing-solus/
...Granted, this article is for an outdated version of Solus, but some of the ideas seemed quite good. Here were the items I couldn't seem to resolve:
- GRUB issues. The only time I believe I've ever seen the GRUB menu is when I first installed the operating system. I'm not bothered by this, but I found it perplexing when my noob self (which is still the case) could not manage to make the suggested commands given on the article page work. Either Solus 4.1 changed quite a bit from 4, or there was just something else going on that I never managed to overcome. There is a grub.save file in the /etc/default directory, but no file simply known as "grub". Opening grub.save with nano furthermore does not lead me to find the "GRUB delay" which the article mentions - I really find nothing at all!
...I only still wonder about this one, as even though I don't see any GRUB anywhere, but there is about a 5-second wait upon entering the HD decryption key that seems arbitrary. Unless that wait is needed for something, it would be nice to skip that delay and get on to logging in proper. Any insight on this?
- MS Fonts. I recall running the terminal commands as suggested on the article page. The result of doing this is that I ended up with "mscorefonts-1.3-3-1-x86_64.eopkg" in my home folder. I seemed to think that the thing installed at the time, but I'm not convinced it really did. Granted, I've not done all that much with word processing on this machine yet, but being able to use common fonts seems like an admirable goal. What would I do to get the fonts working? Or, an even better question, why would something as seemingly helpful as these particular fonts not be available in the 3rd-party section of the Software Center?
That said, thank you for all the great answers to questions here. It was very helpful - hopefully someone other from myself benefited from the conversation as well.