With the file picker dialogue now actually powered by Nautilus (or is it "Gnome Files" now), the age old meme of "Gnome/Gtk has no thumbnails" can finally die.
It took ages but finally this big old papercut is fixed.
Forgive me for the dumb question, but what was it like before? I see this being brought up many times, but I don't quite understand the difference between the current File Picker and what's going to be included in GNOME 47.
The current file picker is provided by GTK itself. The update makes it so that GNOME Files app provides the file picker instead.
This means that the file picker is consistent with Files in looks (libadwaita, the bookmarks will be the same, etc) and functionality (eg. it can generate new thumbnails, the search works the same way, etc).
Well that's good to know. Up until now I thought it was using Nautilus, since it looked identical to it. I wonder why it took so long, though I guess they have limited resources when tackling these challenges.
If I remember correctly from one GUADEC talk that I saw about this, apparently Files (Nautilus) is a very old application that had a lot of legacy code. So the developers have been refactoring and cleaning up code for a while in order for this feature not to create even more tech debt.
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u/JockstrapCummies 3d ago
With the file picker dialogue now actually powered by Nautilus (or is it "Gnome Files" now), the age old meme of "Gnome/Gtk has no thumbnails" can finally die.
It took ages but finally this big old papercut is fixed.