UNIX seems, historically, to focus on utility. There are lockable doors but you get the keys. It becomes your choice to manage your machine(s) at whatever level

UNIX seems, historically, to focus on utility. There are lockable doors but you get the keys. It becomes your choice to manage your machine(s) at whatever level you need to. Critical utilities and management can almost always be automated because of the philosophy of having a CLI which can be made to work without user interaction and because devices and critical parts of the system are exposed to scripting languages (/proc /dev etc). Such a philosophy makes it impossible to create a truly easy-to-use system because the "OS" cannot make assumptions about its state. e.g. you have a configuration file and the root user can edit it with a text editor and introduce inconsistencies. So either you don't allow the user to introduce "not anticipated" states or you let them and on their head be it. That seems to me to be the main UNIX philosophy - "ultimately the choice is yours". That doesn't mean you can't screw it up and make it something else. I think the corporate interests who are paying for the development of Linux have made choices that have moved it a few steps away. Thanks to open source, however, one can escape their clutches for a price.