Would they ever "busk" on the streets, or would they mostly take paid gigs with the upper classes? How far and often would they travel? Were they often considered vagrants, subversives, or undesirables? Did such a troubadour archetype really exist at all, or was it merely a fiction from a later time? Are there any notable historical examples of troubadour's lives?
You had nobles like Guilhem IX de Poitiers, you had merchants like Raimon de Tolosa, you had clerics like Peire Rogier. The archetype of the wild life of troubadours exists because it was conventional in the Provence to add a short biography (a "vida") for each of the anthologized poets together with a background for how this or that song was created (a "razon"). Now, these "vidas" and "razons" were ought to be entertaining, first of all, so that you sometimes got several different stories for the life behind the same set of poetry.
In the one vida the misogynist Marcabrun is cast as the son of a destitute single mother. The other one has him grow up as the adopted child of the noble overlord of Auvillar. Both vidas are attempting to explain his poetry and both are entertaining. Is any one the true one? We will never know. But that "vida" tradition would influence some later poets to provide (presumably) exaggerated accounts of their own biographies in rhyme. That is the most famously the case for the Parisian paupers Rutebeuf and Villon, for the Tyrolean knight von Wolkenstein and, naturally, for Dante Alighieri.