What it is:
After 2 days of rage and tears, I finally managed to get xfce to show up on a pc that I put FreeBSD on. I proudly hit PrtScr only to be told I did not have a 'screenshooter'. I quickly pkg search screenshooter and got one to preserve my moment of triumph. (Why lightdm is still failing to start is better saved for another day...)
Why it is: I have an old pc I inherited that is a real devil. It hates Linux (I tried Zorin and antiX). It runs Linux well but on bare metal or even Live USB, it will randomly "freeze" inexplicably and stay frozen forever unless a hard reset of the power button. Or the screen will suddenly go black and a few moments later it boots back up. Thanks to another forum I think I have pinpointed the main issue as a faulty HDD but while I wait on a new SSD I was curious: why does Windows 10 never freeze on this pc (I made 100GiB partition install of Windows 10 to test the uptime) with a faulty disk? So I made another partition of 100GiB and put FreeBSD on it to find out if this pc just hates Linux specifically or anything non-Windows in general.
All thanks to Zorin and this forum of course. Before y'all I would have never known about anything but Windows and would never dream of partitioning even a USB let alone a HDD. I'm not sure I even knew what a partition was back then. You guys are just awesome because your answers to our questions show us how to think like a power user lol.