I gave up on FreeBSD on the Dell XPS L501X for now. I tried and tried and couldn't get Ly or Sway working. The computer was released 16 years ago. I'm not surprised it wasn't easy. After failing to get XFCE working and staring down Xorg configuration I had to bail.
Now, OpenSuse Tumbleweed is working just fine with KDE 6.8. I installed the SSD a few years ago during the good old days, so there's about 1TB free space. Shame it's so hard to extract, or I'd have swapped it for something smaller.