I guess this forces folks to read the questions. But I've not seen how this works in practice. Can they quickly get to a free-form issue?

React mixes the two styles and the textareas are free text https://github.com/facebook/react/issues/new/choose

Also, I learned that I can validate these forms by looking at 'em on github https://github.com/story645/matplotlib/tree/itemplates/.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE

I think it can't hurt to try this. When folks fill out the forms do they have full Github functionality, like they can drag images into them etc?

So this is what the textarea field (c/o of the react form) looks like:

I'm not sure if we should convert all the issues to forms though, which is why I've left both.

Should we just convert them and try it for a while? Its easy to revert if we get complaints/decide we don't like it. I do like the idea of some mandatory fields, because it saves some time in triage...

So I got rid of the *.md files, but which fields do folks think should be mandatory? I picked whatever I thought made sense, but likely missed some and required others nobody else thinks should be mandatory.

I'd make "Bugs: Backend" optional. It's not relevant for most of the bugs. Users do not necessarily know what a backend is, so it may be confusing.

"Bugs: Code for Reproduction". Shorten the description to
"If possible, please provide a minimum self-contained example."

Install source should probably have "Distro (Debian/Fedora/etc.)"

Oh, so should I add another option (Linux package manager?) or make it a seperate freeform like the conda package? I ask for the system elsewhere - basically the form won't let me do other (freetext)

Just another option, I think. They can always leave a note in the system field or something if that's not good enough.

Let's see how it goes.