I’m not really talking about teaching and guiding though.

If you look at the meme, one of the responses is something like “PRs welcome.”

I think that’s appropriate in certain circumstances.

You are correct, there is nothing wrong with a lack of knowledge or dumb questions. I’m referring more to how they ask their dumb questions.

Some newbies come with hostility, pride, and entitlement, not ignorance.

They request new features, say something sucks bc of blah blah blah, and then get mad at people responding rudely back. But what else should we respond with in this kind of situation? They aren’t looking to learn. They are looking to degrade projects, users, and maintainers.

They aren’t looking for answers; they’re looking to be mad about something and confirm their opinion that “Linux sucks” or some other such bias.

So yeah, when someone comes humbly even with bad assumptions, absolutely correct and guide, but there’s no point guiding people who don’t actually want guidance, ya know? Pearls before swine

So sometimes these aren’t bad responses

Tbf, those are sometimes valid responses, the new user just doesn’t realize what they’re asking is dumb, and it’s exhausting to deal with when a bit of reading would solve the problem or show them what they’re asking is impossible.

FreeBSD is not Linux, it is Unix.

See the “BSD?” That stands for “Berkley Software Distribution” which was the Unix that was used at UC Berkley back in the day. It uses a Unix kernel not the Linux kernel.

There is certainly overlap between the worlds of modern Unix and Linux, since much of the Unix world benefits from the popularity of Linux and FOSS as a whole, but it still is its own thing.

Namely, the biggest difference is that FreeBSD is a complete OS. All components other than a user’s personally installed apps are made by (or at least integrated and maintained by) the FreeBSD team itself. Linux is technically just a kernel, and a Linux distribution, while similar to a Unix distribution, is made up of many many many moving parts made by lots of different people, each piece with its own goals then steered into working together.

Now, there are some exceptions. There is a bit of a blur now. These days, the BSDs have more 3rd-party parts and the Linux world has become more governed and polished, but they are ultimately different things with different goals.

There are plenty of other BSD descendents including OpenBSD and to a lesser extent Darwin (aka the macOS core, which runs an XNU kernel based on the Mach microkernel with a BSD subsystem beside it)