I think a huge cause of many of the problems of being user unfriendly is the hacker culture surrounding the free Unix circle.
Next / Apple proved that is is quite possible to make a user friendly unix, and in a fairly short time frame - given the motivation and a clear direction.
Unfortunately free software by it's nature is driven by individual developers with an itch to scratch and the level of co-ordination required to get something like say, OS X or NextStep done just isn't there. We can't even agree on a standard filesystem layout, init system, desktop UI toolkit, etc.
Continually having to learn a new UI (be it GUI, configuration file format, etc.) is simply not user friendly.
Next / Apple proved that is is quite possible to make a user friendly unix, and in a fairly short time frame - given the motivation and a clear direction.
Unfortunately free software by it's nature is driven by individual developers with an itch to scratch and the level of co-ordination required to get something like say, OS X or NextStep done just isn't there. We can't even agree on a standard filesystem layout, init system, desktop UI toolkit, etc.
Continually having to learn a new UI (be it GUI, configuration file format, etc.) is simply not user friendly.