Yes, "It's FOSS, go fork it" and all that malarkey.
Painting with broad strokes: MacOS and others make money on things being polished, consistent and understandable. They don't get to use their hacker blinders and say "Who needs a GUI for that" or act like Firefox and rearrange the UI every six months.
Thus, often times, the usability of OSes with a financial incentive for broad accessibility will be the most polished.
Ubuntu for a period wanted to break into the desktop OS market. They focused on polish and went so far as to create their own desktop environment (and display server)! They didn't fully succeed, but the point stands: There are many people outside the hacker community who are not going to write their own DE, who nevertheless hold the valid (and often, IMO, correct) opinion that Linux UIs blow more often than Windows/Mac.
PS: This isn't an argument about rights and obligations; I'm not saying randomGnomeDev123 has some moral obligation to do as randomUser345 asks. Just don't confuse "lack of obligation" with "being right".
And this feature is in PopOS 20.04 which iirc is a GNOME desktop, so someone did care enough about this and created a polished desktop environment with it.
Ah yes, System76, that other company that is trying to make money on hardware and creating a competitive advantage with a polished UX. Thank you for providing my case with evidence.
I'm annoyed but not annoyed enough to learn proper Glib C for so I can fix it. I can probably make it work if I tried, but my attempts would never get accepted back into the code base because of the terrible mess I'd turn the code into.
This issue is one of the things that a normal, non-technical user would run into if they'd ever try Linux. If the file picker can't even get feature parity with Windows XP's, you're not attracting a lot of growth.
I'm fine with waiting for someone to eventually fix it in Gnome 8 or 9, but this is a real usability issue that indicates an entire area of the framework can use some work.
I wish things worked worked like that. That users could actually tell you exactly what would make their lives easier. Even more: that they would go ahead and implement those things themselves!
Good software design encompasses listening to and talking with users, and actually discovering what they need, where their pain points are, etc. They won't tell you explicitly.
Apart from being a software developer, i'm also a user of course. I use GNOME every day, and even though i'm affected by this, i haven't found the time, patience and dedication to actually go and try to fix it. I understand that the GNOME developers might not have the time either. But it's not like this issue does not exist, or that it's not important.
And if i, and many people who see this as an issue and could potentially fix it, don't do it, then how can we expect that non-technical users would?
I have tried to teach my mother how to copy files between devices countless times in Windows. It's not an easy task for someone who hasn't grown using a computer. I'd love to advocate for more people to use Linux, but i won't, because each little thing like not being able to see the image whumbnails when picking files can be a road-blocker for non-technical people, and add up quickly.
Not at all? This is FOSS. If this was a critical issue that blocked people from using the software, or aggravated a developer enough, then someone would go fix it or be paid to fix it.
Developers don't have an obligation to implement every feature request. Clearly this is a nothingburger
Hrm, I don't think so. It's probably more a matter of people that are accustomed to Gnome having accepted and/or habituated to the fact that it doesn't display thumbnails in the file manager. The same folks may have devised clever work arounds (opening the filesystem in a browser for example) or otherwise solved the problem in a way that it's not an impediment.
The problem with this line of thinking is that it ignores a huge cohort of potential adopters that would be stopped dead in their tracks at this issue. I think about scenarios where I might introduce an older family member to a Linux desktop for all the benefits it would bring (low cost, stable, secure, etc), and then how it would feel having to explain that they can't easily preview a photo when navigating the filesystem (like I was making excuses for a platform with a gaping hole).
In any system, it's heard to measure losses from things you don't have. A business might get that feedback from prospects that don't close, etc ("you don't have widget X, so we won't sign"), but it's harder to measure those feedback loops in the FOSS word. In short, I think not having this is a big deal, and folks that won't admit to that probably aren't considering a bunch of adoption that can't/won't happen until the issue is fixed.
That's the way it is when you depend on volunteers, they work on things when they feel like it. A solution would be to pay for a company-supported distro. Some were mentioned in other comments here.
Or alternative: Gnome devs are OK with missing basic functionality and a broken experience for 2 decades on, otherwise one of them would have gone and implemented it.
If you look at the report time, this has been a known issue since 2004. This suggests the Devs have been ignoring or kicking the can down the road for over 15 years.
Yes, "It's FOSS, go fork it" and all that malarkey.
Painting with broad strokes: MacOS and others make money on things being polished, consistent and understandable. They don't get to use their hacker blinders and say "Who needs a GUI for that" or act like Firefox and rearrange the UI every six months.
Thus, often times, the usability of OSes with a financial incentive for broad accessibility will be the most polished.
Ubuntu for a period wanted to break into the desktop OS market. They focused on polish and went so far as to create their own desktop environment (and display server)! They didn't fully succeed, but the point stands: There are many people outside the hacker community who are not going to write their own DE, who nevertheless hold the valid (and often, IMO, correct) opinion that Linux UIs blow more often than Windows/Mac.
PS: This isn't an argument about rights and obligations; I'm not saying randomGnomeDev123 has some moral obligation to do as randomUser345 asks. Just don't confuse "lack of obligation" with "being right".