Beginning with FreeBSD on exotic devices like these is going to ensure a poor first impression. Had she started on a standard x86_64 PC desktop or supported laptop like the thinkpads, she would have had much better results.
She could have just ^C'ed it, but coming from Linux, how was she supposed to know that?
Or just all the things currently running interactively.
Or maybe just everything that hasn't started yet.
Any option is better than having to chose between waiting indefinitely or hitting ctrl-alt-del and starting in single user mode and hoping to be able to disable it there.
Agreed that it's a poor default these days, but for what it's worth the option is available in the post-install setup interface alongside some other security tuning knobs.
So the install completed, and everything was fine as long as I stuck to command line stuff. But under xfce, mate, and even plain X Windows, the mouse had a jerky/laggy movement that I didn't know how to fix. I tried enabling/disabling moused but it didn't seem to have any effect. Maybe it was something about running in a VM, but I have no such problem running linux distros in a VM. Anyway, it was such a pain that I finally gave up.
They’re on the Tier 2 support tier, not the Tier you’re foolish to even try to use this support tier.
> Had she started on a standard x86_64 PC desktop or supported laptop like the thinkpads, she would have had much better results.
On the other hand, if she owned the wrong laptop the entirety of the text might have been about making her touchpad work or something.