Free. Free to download and use and improve and customize.

Free to share with friends. To develop useful shell-scripting, use language compilers or interpreters; all free. Lots of free programs to install for games or web-browers, graphics programs, utilities, office management software... just hook up to the Internet.

Is it the easiest thing in the world to do? No. Usually if it's that simple, they sell it in the retail stores or everyone else is already doing it. It's like all the forum software you can find now.. you get out of it as to what you choose to put into it. It's amazing to see how much the younger generation is able to acheive.

Plus, good ol' spyware, malware and adware doesn't install itself on FreeBSD unix. It chokes on itself then gags the promoters. They roll their eyes when they see the reference to something other than Windows-powered OS'es. Give me a broadband connection, a decent router to a few machines and I'll carry in some floppy disks and have the whole shooting match up in a week. Labour intensive? Sure.

How much does a copy of MS Office 2005 cost now? How much did you pay for that extended telephone support which routes you to India or Kenya? How many useful online resources do you have available to you? Or how many MCSE's are sitting around on IRC help channels and giving you the answers for free when they paid hundreds of dollars for training and to pass their certifications?

Is it the best way to play your DVD movies or to mix your latest .mp4 files? Probably not, but the nice thing is that it keeps evolving. Those following generations are also free.

Sure, there are little irritants that will bother you. I would rather have some text messages scrolling off the screen than the issue of finding 3 different new directories and a piece of malware which replicates itself as soon as you delete the registry entries or working directories.

It's not the worst thing you'll ever do and you'll learn more about your computer than you thought you might. You'll learn more about compatability and device settings. What's your screen refresh rate range at 60, 70 or 75 Hz? What depth of color can you get at each? Want to play a game and have awesome frame-rates? Maybe you'll learn to design a few while you are at it. Speaking of which... most game programming is done on Unix-based systems using the C+/C++ language. Heck!! The C-language was used to write it's offspring. That's right... it's been used to develop Ruby, Lua, Python and to an extent PHP.

Maybe give FreeBSD and the windowed GUI of KDE and find out what your missing. I have 6-desktops to choose from on mine. Opera is up in one, Firefox is sometimes up in another, the multi-messenger compatable Kopete (AIM, MSN, Yahoo) is on another and any graphics programs comes up in the 4th. Not to mention it comes with it's own brower and graphical file manager like Windows Explorer.

I challenge you to try it when you're bored. I DARE you!