FreeBSD 12(current) on a 2017 XPS 13 has been great for me. Funny thing is I never imagined buying a dell laptop. I was going to purchase a new mac, but the touch bar killed that for me. So far so good with the XPS 13.
I can at least confirm for you that you made the right choice. Today I went to use the touchbar to adjust the volume on a conference call I was in and ended up hitting the contextual "home" button, taking me away from the page (and call) entirely. I guess I should have memorized which invisible part of the touchbar corresponded to what better. I miss hardware buttons.
Did that end the call? Most conferencing tools I use are happy if you shift away. I have to say I hardly ever use the volume buttons on my Mac and I use it 10-14h a day.
To get a working install it was very easy. I just grabbed the latest FreeBSD 12 snapshot iso and put it on a usb drive and installed like normal. Everything but the wifi works. So I'm using a usb wifi dongle. You need the new (experimental) drm-next code and drivers for suspend and resume support. If your comfortable with a unix command line environment you can get a working dev environment in a couple hours.
So besides the wifi everything is working and iirc someone has been working on a driver for the builtin wifi card and plans on merging it into 12 sometime this year.
But so far I'm loving it, I have ZFS, Dtrace, Sublime3, Firefox57 and xterm, which is an ideal dev environment for me.
I’m toying with converting mine from arch to FBSD on the same machine — where did you get the drm-next bits? Is it from Ports or a branch on /usr/src? I bought a dongle to try it out but somehow ended up with one of the few unsupported ones... which one are you using?
