In this paper, we investigate the uplink transmission for user-centric cell-free massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The largest-large-scale-fading-based access point (AP) selection method is adopted to achieve a user-centric operation. Under this user-centric framework, we propose a novel inter-cluster interference-based (IC-IB) pilot assignment scheme to alleviate pilot contamination. Considering the local characteristics of channel estimates and statistics, we propose a location-aided distributed uplink combining scheme to balance the relationship among the spectral efficiency (SE), user equipment (UE) fairness and complexity, in which local partial minimum mean-squared error (LP-MMSE) combining is adopted for some APs, while maximum-ratio (MR) combining is adopted for the remaining APs. A corresponding AP selection scheme based on a novel proposed metric representing inter-user interference is proposed. We also propose a new fairness coefficient taking SE performance into account to indicate the UE fairness. Moreover, the performance of the proposed scheme is investigated under fractional power control and max–min fairness (MMF) power control. Simulation results demonstrate that the channel estimation accuracy of our proposed IC-IB pilot assignment scheme outperforms that of the conventional pilot assignment schemes. It is also shown that compared with the benchmark LP-MMSE combining, the proposed location-aided combining trades 13.45\(\%\) average SE loss for 26.61\(\%\) UE fairness improvement and 28.58\(\%\) complexity reduction when \(\gamma = 0.6\). And by adjusting the threshold \(\gamma\), a good trade-off between the average SE, UE fairness and computational complexity can be provided by the proposed scheme. Furthermore, the proposed scheme with fractional power control can better demonstrate the advantages of trade-off performance than MMF power control and full power transmission.