It would be interesting to compare say Debians repositories (all of them), and to the FreeBSD Ports collection. I do not know how much drivers and practical software packages that would differ between them. PF is clearly a killer-app of bsd, and maybe systemd on the linux side. Would make for a very interesting read if done properly without too much political bias.

However, I don't think it will help the parent post. Doing a base install, and wading through all the contrib packages and build a custom operative system is not the most practical thing to do. There are a reason why Debian has so many derivatives that picks and chose between the 40,000 applications laying around in debian repository. This is (in my view) the primary reason why Ubuntu has more installs than Debian, even if debian has more total available packages.

(As a side note: Thanks to your post I went and looked at ports collection and noticed that freeBSD do include many ported linux drivers through ports collection. The statement that I read earlier about porting was thus wrong, as BSD developers will port linux drivers to freeBSD - just not for the freeBSD base install. They also include a linux emulator which makes a linxu vs bsd comparison a bit more muddy.)

I'll agree with you that choosing individual software packages can be a daunting task for someone who's just looking to set up a single laptop or desktop as an end user.

In the FreeBSD world the PC-BSD project (http://www.pcbsd.org) provides an operating system focused on the end-user experience, with a convenient "out-of-the-box" configuration. They track FreeBSD development closely and in general use exactly the same source - primarily changing configuration and tuning options.

From their website: PC-BSD is a desktop operating system based on FreeBSD. Rather than having the user build their own environment from the base operating system, PC-BSD aims to make the FreeBSD experience easy and achievable for the average "casual" computer user.