That just tells me that you never upload images, or that your image folder is not particularly large. If trackpad drivers were broken, that would still be a pretty big issue, even though you personally always use a mouse.
I upload files all the time and for some reason I don't encounter this problem in gnome. Just give the files appropriate names?
Seems like a channer problem. It's not suprising that no one from /g/ has made a patch yet.
Edit: Actually, I just checked and apparently it's because the file picker actually does show thumbnail icons, just very small ones. For example, https://files.catbox.moe/h3s3c3.png
I guess I can usually make out what the image is from the small thumbnail icons!
Thumbnails in your file picker are table stakes at this point.
Everyone has a cell phone capable of holding thousands of images, most of which won't get an appropriate title.
For example, I'm tiling a bathroom now. It was very easy to just take dozens pictures of tiles send them off for approval, and get the top five back for a further price check. That entire workflow was enabled by thumbnails. If we had to check the filename of each image we were sending, it would have slowed things down immensely.
I rename files as I download them (or copy them from my phone/camera) or I just remember the file name that I downloaded. I suppose it's a problem if you have to deal with many unnamed images, but if it really came down to that I would just open up nautilus.
There can't be a more classical linux/developer response to a serious UI issue than "I just do this other repetitive manual task to solve the problem, don't see what the big deal is."
The problem is that channers complain, but do not do productive things like file PRs. So problems that matter to channers will remain unresolved.
If you want something done right, do it yourself. Commercial software is no exception to that.
>why Linux on the desktops fails to take hold.
Linux fails to take hold because it doesn't come preinstalled on laptops, and because it doesn't have the critical market share to take over. Basically nothing to do with file pickers.
The ideal use case is just using drag-and-drop behavior from the file manager, instead of implementing the file manager twice. The reality is that products like Windows have shaped people into thinking about the desktop in a certain way, and linux has limited leeway in reshaping those ideas (including their idiosyncrasies like file pickers).
It is obscenely ridiculous to say that people complaining about a missing usability feature that every other tool on the market has, marks somebody as a channer.
As clearly stated in the article, there had been an open issue for almost a decade, and PRs rejected.
When windows is beating you in usability, you have a serious problem.
People don't make PRs because they've seen how difficult it is to get anything done with the GNOME project. So often is there a fix pr or patch that satisfies the code style and standards, but gets rejected despite user demand because, well, the maintainers don't want that thing fixed or changed. Or they do, but they want to make some sort of point by rejecting a change at that time.
GNOME is one of the weirder and more difficult projects for a stranger to contribute to if your change does not fit into a very narrow and specific set of current priorities (unknown to the outside contributor, so good luck!). It is another world-of-wontfix poster child projects and I don't begrudge anyone who doesn't want to go through the hassle compared to most other open source projects they can spend their time on.
Eventually, you're left with just pointing out how ridiculous something is with GNOME and moving on. You're just not going to be able to get a fix merged regardless of merit, quality or tact. It isn't worth the pain.
Whether you like 4chan or think anybody who goes there is the devil incarnate, using 4chan as your excuse for dismissing such basic functionality as thumbnails in a file picker is deranged. Why not abolish file pickers entirely, since 4chan uses it? In fact lets ban drinking water too, I hear nazis like to drink it. Ban air too, we wouldn't want anybody using it to say something hateful. Is there any insanity "but 4chan exists!" can't be used to justify?
I don't really have anything against channers. I'm just saying it's a problem that one small group disproportionately complains about but does little to fix. I think that is pretty indicative of /g/ discourse which revolves around baiting other users into flamewars.
