[hojjat12000]

This is a dead meme. Boring and annoying specially to the Gnome developers. I have used Gnome for many years now. Never have this been an issue. If you look at the issue tracker[1], they are open to pull requests to add the thumbnail, we just need one person who cares about this feature!

There are many other issues with Gnome that actually is their decision and it is a problem. This specific one is a GTK issue. But for example their decision on window decoration in wayland is just wrong and makes the whole environment look weird[2].

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/233

[2] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/217

[Aengeuad]

Various patches have existed for at least a decade but every time they're proposed some issue is found and they're not merged so the goal posts shift from 'just write your own patch' to 'just become a Gnome maintainer' with no guarantees that you'll get the assistance you need to implement the feature or whether it'll even be merged, and fair enough, the Gnome team really don't owe anybody anything, but in that case getting annoyed that the community keeps referencing a 17 year old issue is just a natural part of the exchange.

[TingPing]

Maintainer refuses to merge bad work, shame on them?

[hda2]

If it was really bad work, then of course not.

The problem is that poor quality isn't the reason why they refuse. While not related to the file picker, I personally offered to port an important part of GTK3 to GTK4 (status icon support) and one of the maintainers told me flat out that he would not merge my work because "it was no longer in line with the direction GNOME is heading".

I suspect the real reason behind their refusal is purely subjective, unfortunately.

[locke78]

That's not subjective. When they merge code like that and then you disappear, they're now stuck budgeting time to maintain that API for years. They can't be expected to do that work when no maintainers care enough and no GNOME apps are even going to use that API (Status icons were removed from the GNOME HIG years ago)

If you don't want to go through the trouble of becoming a committed long-term GTK maintainer yourself just to get this in, why not maintain that particular feature as a separate library?

[yjftsjthsd-h]

That seems excessively dismissive; it's hardly a dead meme while the issue remains open, boring only to the GNOME developers who have decided that little things like what users want is irrelevant, annoying only because it's been a decade with zero attempt at a solution. It's nice that you never use this feature, but unhelpful to others who do. And yes, it's terribly generous of them to be willing to consider merging a fix if someone else does the work.

[JasonFruit]

But, you know, that's how it works: the problem doesn't get fixed unless someone both a) cares, and b) can do something about it. Why would a developer who isn't getting paid do work they don't care about? If you're interested, maybe you can finally be the person who cares and does the work.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Giving something away for free doesn't mean that no one can criticize it. It's a severe shortcoming, it's been there for over a decade, and no obligated to fix it but that doesn't mean anybody is obligated to stop complaining about it either.

[locke78]

It may be time to look elsewhere if the complaints are unanswered for more than a decade; they're probably being directed towards the wrong people. That's an obligation you may want to hold yourself to, if you value your own time and don't want to spend another decade repeating yourself to those who won't listen.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

It kind of depends: I don't use GNOME, but AFAIK both Chrom(ium) and Firefox use GTK and so use the broken file dialog regardless. "Go use something else" is a valid suggestion, but only when you can use something else.

[JasonFruit]

Entirely true, which is why I never said they couldn't complain — just that it won't be fixed until there's a developer who cares enough.

[cosarara]

> we just need one person who cares about this feature

Uh no. There have been at least 3 separate attempts at implementing this. One of them actually lives as a fork on github, and it works. None of them have been merged. The gtk devs don't care.

[Saris]

Why are people so dismissive about this? It's a significant usability problem among many, many others that gnome has.

It should be annoying that the issue keeps coming up.

It's not a 'meme' that gnome lacks an extremely basic feature that is incredibly common in other GUIs.