As a use case let us imagine you desire to open a file to edit in gimp. It is very common to have a folder full of images named very non descriptively by the software that interfaced with your camera or by your camera software on your phone.
Image0001 Image0002 ... Image0165
One useful workflow is to open your file manager which has a nice view in which individual file names are placed under iconic views of the images. Importantly this view is zoomable allowing one to easily view a big enough view of the individual images to allow one to differentiate one similar image from another.
GTK file pickers have traditionally offered.
- Nothing just file names
- Miniscule non zoomable icons that are too small to differentiate and thus virtually useless. I'm talking about 2x3mm on a 24" screen.
- no thumbnails as icons but a panel off to the side which would show a preview of the selected item forcing you to blindly select image0007 and then image0008 each in turn in order to get a look at each in turn in order to select the correct item.
None of these options are even slightly usable. Even the gimps file picker is pretty mediocre and its an image editing program. The really strange thing is obviously such functionality is available when browsing files with nautilus.
QT file pickers on Linux offer functionality similar in nature to normal file managers in browsing and sorting. One can select an icon view and zoom making it actually usable to select images.
A file picker gui is a very basic piece of functionality. A 16 year old bug for offering functionality similar to windows 95 is a legitimate source of consternation.
