WetGeek I think I might try it on our little travel laptop, for a better idea how it works when installed on modest hardware.
I've installed it there now, on a little ASUS Travelmate. Obviously it won't be as performant as my VM, because it's a bit demented -- has a Celeron processor. But it's working reasonably well. Certainly no worse than Solus Budgie was on that machine.
I installed it on a fresh 256GB SSD, so I didn't damage the Solus installation, and SSDs are trivial to swap on that machine without taking the case apart. I can revert it back to Solus in less than a minute if I ever decide that that's necessary.
It was satisfying to get Thunderbird on this laptop by typing "thunderbird" in the terminal. Pretty soon, I was asked if I'd like to have that installed for me. Didn't work for Vivaldi, though, for some reason. I need to find out what it uses for a software manager in the terminal in order to get a few more things it needs.