From my experience, most FOSS software is very user friendly user-centric / user-focused, while proprietary stuff is shit. What is the most notable exception to this rule that comes to your mind?
Edit: With user friendliness, I don’t mean UI design, but things like how the software is handling user privacy, whether it sees its users as users or as money-making cattle, how it handles user feedback, compatibility with other software the user uses (vs. vendor lock-in), configurability, and similar issues.
Edit2: I was made aware that user friendliness is a defined term: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Userfriendliness
Steam
Steam doesn’t fit OP’s criteria. They definitely prioritise profit over the user’s preference.
When you open the app you’re immediately shown pop-up ads ffs. And the app opens to the store.
You can disable the pop-ups in settings and default to opening your library by default but it’s difficult to locate the relevant settings.
Steam transformed the PC gaming experience for the better but I find people’s reverence of it is misplaced.
The key to steam is that they realised that being user centric, while bad for short term profits is very good for long term profits. They are also not publicly traded, so not just anyone can buy in and try and make a quick buck burning them to the ground.
I’ve found their store and setup to be a reasonable balance of advertising to functionality. The fact that you can adjust it yourself is a good example of their mindset. Most people don’t care or find them useful. Those who don’t like them are unlikely to interact with them, so it’s not worth fighting their efforts to turn them off.
Not really a user-friendliness issue, but pet peeve about one thing that I can’t patch because it’s not open source. Steam doesn’t let me cap the number of concurrent TCP connections when downloading updates. Like, TCP degrades reasonably gracefully under contention; each connection gets something like an equal amount of bandwidth. But with Steam downloads – which are bulk, noninteractive, and which I definitely don’t want to take priority for available bandwidth – the package uses a ton of connections. If you have 30 connections, it gets ~97% of the available bandwidth when contending with a more-conventional protocol that uses a single connection. The Steam downloader logic, as I understand from past reading, keeps adding more until it doesn’t see any significant degree of increase in speed, which is exactly what I don’t want to have it doing. And Valve doesn’t provide any way to turn this off.
Steam does provide some other mechanisms to try to limit its bandwidth usage, but none are very satisfactory.
You can hard-limit the rate of downloads. But I don’t want that – if there’s no contention for bandwidth, I want Steam to use it. I just want it to back off when there is contention.
You can limit the time of downloads. But I don’t always know when there’s going to be demand for bandwidth.
You can limit downloads to not run when playing games. That addresses the very specific case of downloads interfering with Steam games that have latency-sensitive demands, like multiplayer FPSes. But that’s far from the only situation where there’s something contending for bandwidth.
I mostly use open-source software, so it’s really frustrating when I run into behavior in proprietary software that I can’t reasonably fix. Plus, usually if it bothers me, it’s bothered someone else in the past, and they’ve gone and fixed it, so I don’t even need to do so.