In this case, PRs were made for close to a decade, tons of people implemented the feature in forks etc but upstream just didn't want it. You can't tell people to just write the code since it's open source when that's irrelevant here, the code itself wasn't what was missing. Though I still think it's great that it is now done regardless of the weird historic that specific feature had.
There are gtk file picker forks (like Nemo I think?) But I guess you could argue that they didn't just add the file picker thumbnails. So here is an example of a patch to make thumbnails work:
> Also, why isn't that patch in an MR to GTK (if the author wanted to upstream it)?
These MRs do a minimal change to just add thumbnails. The current file manager uses outdated widgets. Gnome/GTK expects MRs to also replace deprecated widgets in all files touched by that MR. Replacing those deprecated widgets would require a massive refactor.
Okay sure? I never said otherwise, you asked me for forks and I gave them to you. What's your point? I get that open source needs people to complain less and contribute more, my point is just that while it might be valid for tons of situations, it just isn't make sense for the file picker thumbnails saga.
