> I know to read and I know to copy paste

You'd be surprised. I've seen many arrogant users try to install Arch and fail because they were literally incapable of reading and understanding the simple instructions written on the Arch Wiki. Even technical users of other distributions. Sometimes they use an installer and manage to get a working system with no effort... Only for it to stop working because they failed to read the news and some update required manual intervention. If I remember correctly, users are required to provide pacman output as a form of CAPTCHA in order to create an Arch Wiki account. They must prove they installed Arch in order to edit the wiki.

A certain degree of elitism is great, no matter the community. Arch Linux users are expected to be responsible for their own systems, it's expected that they will take care of it and maintain it. People who can't or won't do this are better off using something else.

The bar can be as low as it wants to if it effectively filters people out. It's like how fizzbuzz is a terrible stupid test until you realize the shocking number of people who claim to be developers but can't pass it.

We would need to do a rigorous test though to see if this low bar is significant, you would have 4 groups of people

- Windows tech people(c/c++ developers) - Linux tech people(c/c++ devs and sys admins) - Arch non tech people that copy pasted instructions - any other OS or distro non tech people

then see if the Arch copy paste-rs are closer to non tech people or closer to tech people. The assumption is that since they can read instructions would create better bug reports, but is also possible they would be over -confident elitist-ic dudes that use weird packages and broke the program with their copy pasting of commands and installing garbage from AUR;

Yet, something like 95% of all desktop users can't do that. You, presumably, disproportionally interact with tech people. Typical office worker might encounter problem that requires terminal once in a year at which point sysadmin is called. And it`s not only about reading and copy pasting it's about ability to devote pretty large amount of attention to a task.

For someone to find the wiki, read it and then attempt to solve their problem in a rudimentary fashion gets you towards the tail end of the bell curve. They might even follow up with you if you have questions.

Nah, is super easy to find the Arch wiki and the install instructions, Arch users will push you hard to it so is impossible not to find it, maybe you might find some honest person though to explain the downsides too.

I'm assuming you don't generally do front-end work, because many many users are complete [insert PC word for zero capacity for rational thought].

I do interact with customers, but I would rather get a bug report from a Kubuntu users that knows the difference between a compiler and a linker then from a 12 years old that managed to copy paste instructions into a command prompt.

And I would rather have either of those than a bug report from anyone I've had to teach to use a browser.

Being able to read and follow instructions is the main skill required to be a good bug reporter.