OK, I'm now quite happy with my FreeBSD laptop. An old Thinkpad x270 (I call it stinkpad because punny) and so far, everything works. Haven't got the lid switch to work right, close and open undifferentiated, but it will work.

There's config scattered all about -- but it is on debian also, just that some of the pref apps hide it. And I never got xfce screen management right.

I've rediscovered old tricks -- dumb old RCS to check in/out every modified config file (they're all just small text files) and a script to crawl the filesystem and find them and back them up.

AND THEN THERE'S PEOPLE LIKE THIS GUY!!

https://www.sacredheartsc.com/blog/freebsd-15-on-a-laptop/

Yowza, a linear list of things to do, skip the ones you don't want (KDE, for me) every single item succinctly and correctly called out. Was nice to find after I was making headway through these things anyway.

I really like ctwm. I'm running 10 virtual workspaces, Control-1 through Control-0 (zero). It's exceedingly lightweight but with 30 years of development, it just boringly works.

Still have a list of little things to work out (locking session on lid close, timed screen blanker) but I'm way past the point of 'does this work for me'. Yes it does.