I did a live-environment test of #GhostBSD with #MATE on my remaining 2017 HP laptop. This computer is a Pavilion with Intel Core i7 7th Gen and Nvidia.

Aside from the Nvidia, it's pretty similar to my now-dead 2017 HP Envy, and I moved the 480 GB SATA SSD and 16 GB RAM from the dead laptop to the working one.

Maybe it was the live environment, but I had trouble getting #LibreOffice installed with the graphical package manager. It went most of the way, but I had to use pkg from the terminal to finish the installation of the office suite. But after that, LO was able to create and open a password-protected document, unlike in my previous tests. I'm glad that the LO package was fixed for all #FreeBSD users. It took longer than would be ideal, but at least it happened.

Nothing has changed in terms of being able to control brightness and volume with the laptop keys meant for that purpose. They still don't work. I had to set brightness in the terminal. Volume does work with the slider in the panel. And audio was very good, unlike on my 2011 iMac 27-inch, where I only got the treble speakers and not the bass ones.

I can't remember how brightness worked on the iMac. I might have to boot into that one again to check that out. Booting to a USB drive on the iMac is annoying: You need to use a wired keyboard. It won't work with that machine's regular keyboard, a Logitech wireless. I couldn't find my generic USB keyboard, so I had to pull an old Mac keyboard out of the box I hope to ship it in when I sell it. It has one of those ADB to USB adapters from the '90s (??), and it surprisingly still works. I suspect the adapter is worth more than the keyboard.

Back to the HP Pavilion and GhostBSD, just like with the iMac, wireless networking was excellent. The graphical interface worked for both.

I would consider GhostBSD, but at this point I'm more interested in FreeBSD with Plasma. I wish there was a live image that I could try before doing an install. I ran #OpenBSD on the original HP laptop for a long time, and the brightness and volume keys worked OOTB, so it's possible for FreeBSD to do it. But for the shaky machines I have, I really want #ZFS in order to cope with crashes and power loss. My whole intent with FreeBSD is to explore ZFS.

I do Mango & Niri on Slackware, Slackware JTown (KDE) on another NUC and will re-do dwm on Gentoo on the laptop by tomorrow.
So how about that BSD Challenge then?
Grabbed that Thinkpad, of course the latest GhostBSD wouldn't install. Bitten by a rare FreeBSD bug. But the previous version installed without a hitch and I'm doing a dist-upgrade now. Gotta say that this is by far the best and most accessible BSD install I've seen.
#ghostbsd

#GhostBSD 26.1: #FreeBSD-Desktop mit #XLibre und #ZFS-Snapshots | iX Magazin https://www.heise.de/news/GhostBSD-26-1-FreeBSD-Desktop-mit-XLibre-und-ZFS-Snapshots-11267057.html #OpenSource

I booted into the live environment of #GhostBSD on my 2011 iMac 27-inch.

I always forget that this Mac requires the original keyboard (I'm sure it's somewhere) or a wired USB keyboard to boot from USB. It took me a while to find one.

It booted fine and looks great.

Sound was a problem. Only the treble speakers were working. The bass speakers were silent. I saw a couple #FreeBSD and GhostBSD posts on potential fixes, but nothing definite.

I might return to FreeBSD on this system and try to figure out the sound issue, but I'm more likely to give some other Linuxes a try first.
It has run #Debian 10/11/12/13 over the years. That has been very reliable. Recently some Flatpak apps (generally Electron-based) have had some graphics issues, but going from Wayland to X11 has fixed that.