For starters, you have several FreeBSD distributions that simply make it easy to install, once installed, it is a FreeBSD system as is.

- GhostBSD
- TrueOS
- MidnightBSD
- NomadBSD

Although the installation of FreeBSD is not far from the difficulty of installing Debian in text mode.

Besides, the official documentation of FreeBSD is much better than that of any Linux distribution, so I recommend that if you dare to start directly with FreeBSD. 

 Thank you! I do not have issues or difficulties installing OS also via text mode…  I’ve been doing it for decades… my main concern is that, as far as I know, there are several issues with BSD regarding hardware support especially on laptops… WiFi, keyboard backlight, touchpad, graphic card, etc… 

 Hardware support is less than in Linux, it is a matter of testing with the hardware you have.

Also don't discriminate the option of using virtual machines, here you won't have hardware problems, BSD is one more tool you have available. 

 Yes, agreed with you about virtual machines! 

 For someone using Linux mint (rely pretty heavily on gui) is there a good bsd flavor? 

 GhostBSD 

 Thanks, I’ll give it a go today! 

 OpenBSD might be a more desktop friendly flavour. But try them and see which one works better for you and enojy the path.