I recently tried to teach myself F#. Although the community is very small compared to others, the folks I ran into were warm and enthusiastically helpful.
Most of the intro texts I tried were not good. I found a fantastic one, but it is an outdated, abandoned text that must be accessed through the Internet Archive [1]. I tried to contact the authors to see if I could help updating it, but received no response.
The language has a large surface area. It is not uncommon to think you have learned a lot of F#, then read a blog post by someone full of F# code and think "what the heck is that symbol?"
I agree with others that note the MS influence. Things are definitely getting better, but you will have an easier time if you are in the MS ecosystem.
For what it's worth, I wrote a blog post [2] that might be helpful if you're trying to get started.