It's always great to hear about people finding it and liking it! Even better is that, in a meaningful way, it's not "a MS language" really now - it's fully open source, probably the best thing to happen to F# this year.
I'm aiming that comment less at you than just generally because the general publicity around that is probably a bit lacking - but if things like that matter to you, F# is still a great place to look :)
Hope you carry on enjoying F# - the community is one of the friendliest, do come and say hello!
The last time I tried F# it was definitely a Microsoft language, in spite of their invitation to Linux users. It was hard to get it to install, it didn't work right, not all libraries were available on Linux, and I couldn't even access videos explaining the language because they required Silverlight. When I posted my experience to Reddit in order to give them feedback, I definitely didn't find a friendly community.
Things may have changed. I wasn't turned off by the fact that Linux support was so far from where it needed to be. I expected that. It was the toxic response that turned me off.
You posted to reddit and got a toxic response? Frankly I'm not sure that's a reflection on F# or reddit. I've been a member on reddit for years yet rarely vote or comment. Whenever I post something, seemed like all I ever got was abuse. Who knows? Perhaps reddit has changed.
As for F#, I've been using it since beta. All I did was get the books and slog through them. Coming from a strong OOP background, I had quite a bit of "this makes my head hurt!" before the light started coming on, but once I came to grips with the power of the language, I didn't look back.
Yes, not all libraries are available on linux. I program F# almost exclusively on linux, and that doesn't bother me at all. The number of libraries that are available, compared to other platforms, is astounding. A couple of times I needed some kind of weird library, so I went and found an open source windows F# version (or C# version, gotta love CLR), then just added the project to my solution. Presto chango, I built both projects at the same time and got a huge amount of functionality for the price of an hour or so downloading code and building it.
(disclaimer: I write microservices any more. No GUIs)
Biggest problem I have with my set up is remembering some of the switches and tweaks to get the thing to build. My code runs so great without my having to horse around with it, so it might be months between getting out the tools. That's usually a couple of hours of banging my head against the wall, but once I've got the build cycle nailed, it's a sweet setup. Best I've used in a long time.
The F# community seem to be most active via twitter, Google+ and (slightly bizarrely) StackOverflow chat in my experience. /r/fsharp is pretty small, although I've always found it friendly.
I actually wasn't sure as to F#'s independence; that's good to hear. Being free and open means it'll keep going even if MS gets bored with it, though it's mainly its 'first class' status with the MS tools (VS and .NET) that make me still think of it as an 'MS language' I guess, and also part of what excites me about it. I mostly use Windows and Windows Phone, so being able to write native Windows apps with a functional language is something I've been seeking for some time now.
I'm aiming that comment less at you than just generally because the general publicity around that is probably a bit lacking - but if things like that matter to you, F# is still a great place to look :)
Hope you carry on enjoying F# - the community is one of the friendliest, do come and say hello!