I've been using FreeBSD since version 4.3 on and off. Most of the time I've used it with variants of ThinkPads, recent ones were T530i and E480. The longest period I've spent as my main OS was long time ago on Sony Vaio VGN-FS550. In a sense it has improved a lot, but also managed to remain complicated for someone who just want to test things without prior knowledge. But yes, this is typical amount of things you need to undergo when starting with FreeBSD. And it remained pretty much the same for the past 19 years. I've switched to Linux as my main OS, just because I wanted things to work out of the box.