Also an issue for me, it does nothing for the already abysmal photography/image editing workflow. I try to use Qt programs where I can or xdg-desktop-portal where it's supported but some programs like Gimp still don't support it.

I loathe this line of thinking.

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".

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.

“Stop being poor” kind of an argument

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.

There are several submitted patches that add this functionality on the bug report but Gnome developers have not merged them. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141154&

The people most likely to be impacted will be artists, photographers, and similar.

This is a useless viewpoint when the grief is held by mostly non-devs.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.