im with you man, FUCK ads, it was a major motivator moving from windows, as well as DRM and system level 0 anti-cheat.

you answered my second question but not in the way I intended, I meant to ask for more of a methodology like, do you just read the man pages? do you refer to AI? are you just full trial and error? does your work provide resources? Im asking because I generally want to see why its such an issue for people to find info, personally I use a mix of selfhosted AI and various forums and wikis. I wouldn't be supprised if some users are learning 100% through chatgpt or a single youtube channel.

Im experiencing much the same with the community it seems to be a 60-40 whether im going to find actual help or have someone just tell me to RTFM and the people who do care are absolutely kind and absurdly helpful. Your observation about the gaming focused linux community being slightly more on the toxic side is probably an apt assessment. and probably skews the initial proportion of 60-40 to the more to the toxic side where as it would otherwise be something like 80-20 helpful and toxic respectively.