NomadBSD

Speaking of using BSD as a general purpose operating system: NomadBSD is a persistent live system for USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD. Together with automatic hardware detection and setup, it is configured to be used as a desktop system that works out of the box, but can also be used for data recovery, for educational purposes, or to test FreeBSD's hardware compatibility. This seems like quite the polished and minimalist - yet full-featured - FreeBSD distribution to test out your hardware.