I've been avoiding linux groups in general for the last 20 years because every time I dip in (slashdot, digg, reddit) I wind up asking a legitimate question I get hammered by someone who thinks they are better than everyone else. My last instance was trying to set options in grub or from the console to change the default CLI resolution -- the post was taken over by a mod who didn't even seem to understand what I was asking, and spent his time answering every post by berating me for having the gall for connecting a monitor to a server, because "a real server would never have any kind of display device connected to it." I finally found out why I wasn't getting any replies from the people that had tried to help, someone told me later the mod must have shadow-banned me from the group. That person had logged in under their mod account and noticed all my unanswered replies in the post which they hadn't been able to see under a regular account.

The linux groups here on Lemmy are my first positive experience with any linux groups, and I really hope it stays that way.

I'm currently using Arch and doing the same thing. I learned more than a decade ago not to even bother with asking questions to the community at large. Bunch of self righteous dicks they are.

Any thoughts on which distro has the friendliest community?

I looked this up a few months ago when I was changing from Fedora to OpenSUSE.
OpenSUSE itself was mentioned as having a friendly community, which I thought was great since I was switching to it anyway.

But my first experience asking for help on their official forums was ehhh—I asked about some guidance I'd read in the official docs (basically a blurb that said FYI, you can do this another way), and was told, condescendingly, that "no one does it that way."

That's fine—the sarcastic or condescending tone I mean—maybe it's a European or a German thing that's rubbed off on its users.

The distro itself it great though. I've been able to solve most other issues myself.

What are the arch forums?

Same experience, but on the ubuntu forums more than a decade ago. Those people who can't get recognition IRL seek it online. It doesn't help that they socially awkward due to being ostracized IRL. So they have to spend a lot of time alone teaching themselves stuff / the hard way: through experience and by being belittled by other people who are a few years down the same experience.

They are just like Catholics: I had to suffer, so you do too. The lack of physical presence dehumanizes the interlocutor and makes it easier to be a dick and a compounding factor is one cannot punch somebody through a screen for being a twat.

The less fortunate discriminating against the even less fortunate because for once they have power. It's very human and as many things human, very detrimental.