Had a play with #FreeBSD in live mode from a USB stick on an older laptop tonight just to see if the hardware was supported.
Boy am I out of practice at configuring stuff on the command line! I've become spoilt by GUIs in recent years.
Didn't help with the bug in 15.0 where the WiFi firmware file was incorrectly named and couldn't be loaded for the Intel 8260. Got there eventually, but it seemed to be very slow with iwlwifi. More experimentation required!