Specifically in this case: the user-friendliness of GNU/Linux distros has come a _huge_ way in the last 10 years, but there's no reason why they shouldn't be every bit as surface-friendly (maybe even more so) than the popular commercial OS's while retaining all the power that experts need and want.  It's a terrible shame that more attention is not given to this surface-friendliness, and it's striking how resistant many old-school free software people are to usability-oriented improvements _that don't necessarily constrain them_.

** Example 1 **
I was a longstanding KDE user until with the 12.04 release of Ubuntu, I switched over to using Unity.  I found it much more usable and effective in all sorts of ways, but initially I was frustrated because there were superficially less config options available.  It was striking how quickly I realized _I didn't miss them_ and that most of that configurability I'd had with KDE was a distraction rather than something that assisted me.  As someone wrote round-about that time, there's a tendency for customisability to be an excuse for lack of design.