I had one friend say that basically it's not his thing (he prefers games where everything is a controlled factor, so things like Minecraft and linear FPS games, you can always predict what'll happen and do something to fix it or whatever, or at the least reload) but he does admire Dwarf Fortress for being what is is, however another friend had a great reaction.
See, this other guy's really bad at explaining himself. And extracting information from anything. He loves most Nintendo games, I suspect, because they don't require a lot of thought (he's the kind of person who plays pokemon by just choosing the highest damage moves all the time. He's awful at it but it's an easy game and it doesn't matter so much), so a game where he has to understand different interacting systems and so on was way above him. But despite that he would continually bang on about the graphics, saying such comically stupid things as, "It's all pixels," and, "It doesn't mean anything." Of course no amount of explaining that all screens display things with pixels and trying to show what the different symbols meant would help, the prejudice was there from the moment he couldn't click on the menus.
So yeah not a single success. Thing is trying to explain something like DF is an exercise in frustration, because I tend to learn by experimenting but then other people won't and they want you to explain it and then I don't because that cheapens the learning then they get upset that I'm not telling them and it doesn't turn out well.