Pretty ridiculous how much work this is, when you can also go to a shop buy a pc with windows or a mac and everything works directly after booting the machine.
You say that as if microsoft hasnt gotten a perfect 3/3 for releasing at least one autoinstalling patch per month that breaks peoples stuff in the last three months.
Not saying I'd want to walk my grandma through a freebsd setup, but it's hardly without merit. There's a lot to be said for controlling your own computer.
Well yes it will work after booting, but you usually want your computer to do a bit more than boot.
No machine works perfectly after booting, as the machine is just an instrument to do some WORK. It is the nature of the work that means I have to change the instrument from time to time. FreeBSD, being an open system with a detailed manual allows me to change the machine easily and in a determined manner.
I still haven't figured out how to change many fundamental things on Windows, as it is designed to keep these options hidden from the user.
There are trade-offs for each system. For users who want the power of doing the things how they want to [within limits], FreeBSD is great. If you just want to play Counter-Strike after installing it, well, you can buy another machine for doing that.
If you bought a computer with an os preinstalled, of course everything works on first boot. I haven't seen a lot of computers for sale with FreeBSD preinstalled though.
The last time I bought a computer with an OS preinstalled [a couple months ago], it threw all sorts of popups at me, flashed command prompts at me, doing all sorts of nasty stuff while stealing focus from the programs I was trying to use. And it couldn't find or install any OS updates. Hours and hours of scanning, and nothing would happen. Hours and hours spent googling, trying to manually install updates that supposedly fix the problem but cannot be installed...
