I really don't understand the point people are making when they say "linux is unintuitive". It really depends on what they mean by that.

These people do know that no user interface is inherently intuitive to someone without experience right?

Picture this:

Throw your grandma in front of a windows pc. Commonly considered intuitive in the tech world, right?

She will have no idea what you mean by "start menu" or "window" likely, right?

Everything you learn is built on prior knowledge, even in UX design. When your grandma didn't know the floating windows, one panel at the bottom paradigm beforehand, she was completely lost. She lacked the prior knowledge. People coming to linux from something else won't have the prior knowledge of using linux, just like grandma.

If this homogeneous "linux"-- which there is no such thing as this, its an ecosystem of asynchronous developers with near zero real collaboration at a real useful scale-- does indeed exist, it's gotta either build on prior experience, or be its own thing and advertise that. Realistically all that can happen considering the ecosystem is the latter.

I feel since "linux", is a bunch of devs with a plethora of opinions on UX design, there's always gonna be a failure here.

Users who want to come to linux should understand at least that its a "best efforts" support ecosystem. Its not a windows replacement in the literal sense. If you like it, you will use it, but its certainly not for someone who isn't willing to learn it just like a long time windows user will have to learn macOS when they use a mac. "Linux" is no different here. Its a different ecosystem, with different ecosystem structure and system design.

You gotta build that prior knowledge.