I'm really happy with the progress FLOSS communities have had over the past 3 decades in the kind of environment they foster. For the longest time they were spaces where "got good"/RTFM/PEBKAC was the abrasive default mode of communication between themselves and specially newcomers and that permeated down to the documentation and the software itself. Some places remain like that, but the Cambrian explosion of projects has led to alternative spaces, to the point where I'd say the places where being consistently a dick to each other is acceptable are now a minority.
As an small anecdote that remains seared in my mind and I find representative, as a tech curious young lad I was scouring every bit of open source documentation I could find to learn. I recall reading GNU documentation that kept talking about the Meta-key. I could never figure out how to AltaVista what the hell that was, and it was of course not mentioned anywhere that it was "old-speak" for Alt. The mailing lists looked intimidating, specially when I saw how people treated each other, so I never asked there. Eventually I muddled with getting RedHat and Slackware that came with some magazine installed but would get stuck on gettting my winmodem to work. I never felt I could actually "be part" of the open source space, until Ubuntu came out, sent me CDs to share in school, with a more "meet people where they are"/"welcoming" attitude.