Yeah, to me it reads as someone who recently came from windows, where it can be more or less reasonable to "know everything" about how a user might be aloud to configure and use their OS, and doesn't yet understand what it means to have a truly open OS

It would help if they had given more info, even if you want to know "everything" you gotta start somewhere, but even then, linux is very multi facetted, and it's hard to teach someone without knowing what they know now

Are they already using a distro? If not start there, but if so and they're for example using nabora then information on mint wouldn't exactly suit them very well

That is to say, it's a tough situation, I agree that they didn't handle it the best, but I'm not fully certain how it should have been handled instead