Hacker News Reader

Comment by bstar77 | Hacker News Reader

This is a weird hill to die on. I've never cared much about the file picker and the individual file preview is "good enough" to ensure you pick the correct file. Now if Nautilus didn't have image previews in "icon view", then that's cause for rioting in the streets.

View on HN

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.

Seeing the picture you want to upload is a channer problem?

You guess you just use proper file names?

This attitude is EXACTLY what the author is describing, and why Linux on the desktops fails to take hold.

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).

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.

There have been PRs made to fix this issue which have been rejected, because Gnome hate their users.

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.

“Appropriate file names”?

grand-canyon-001.jpg grand-canyon-002.jpg grand-canyon-003.jpg grand-canyon-004.jpg … grand-canyon-991.jpg

Or maybe

grand-canyon-east.jpg grand-canyon-west.jpg grand-canyon-north.jpg grand-canyon-south.jpg … grand-canyon-northeast.jpg

Thumbnails solve real problems and other guis have had this as a completely solved problem since literally the mid-nineties.

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.

> but if it really came down to that I would just open up nautilus.

So, the downstairs toilet.

Haha, nice but I bet that's going to puzzle some people who haven't read TFA

I use the downstairs toilet is for bulk shits, the upstairs toilet is for petite loads.

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."

>It's not suprising that no one from /g/ has made a patch yet.

They did. Apparently the Gnome devs didn't want it. You can get it from the AUR.

https://gist.github.com/Dudemanguy/c172394e30e1e7d0f477ad15c...

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/gtk3-patched-filechooser-...

> Seems like a channer problem.

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.

Every mainstream desktop has thumbnails in the file picker. People who want this aren't the odd ones, those who dismiss it are.

> I don't really have anything against channers.

I seriously doubt that, since you're the one who brought them up in an absurd attempt to deflect a common sense criticism of an obvious shortcoming.

>People who want this aren't the odd ones, those who dismiss it are.

fair enough.

>I seriously doubt that, since you're the one who brought them up in an absurd attempt to deflect a common sense criticism of an obvious shortcoming.

See my defense of channers in these threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31554117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31554152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31554112

Consider reading the linked post, the author includes screenshots identical to yours and explains that that is not what they mean.

You'd expect the file picker and nautilus to share behaviour though, right? Also for me, if I open the file picker from Chrome/Edge/an Electron app it's forced full screen and there's no preview on the right either.

I love GNOME, use it on both desktop and laptop, but this is one of those things that's just bad.

I definitely agree that it's strange that Nautilus can do this and the file picker can't. I also agree that consistency is important, but this issue has never caused me problems so I don't think anything of it. There are other things in Gnome that are keeping me from using it after being a vocal supporter for decades.

I think the difference is that GtkFilePicker is a part of the running GTK program, like firefox for example. If you wanted to get all of nautilus' features, you would have to embed all of nautilus into your program, including features that would be innapropriate fir a file picker

Maybe instead of just using GtkFilePicker on linux, it should first check if there's an available "xdg-file-picker" in the environment, which gnome sets to nautilus with some flags to run it in file-picker mode.

Embedding Nautilus doesn't mean enabling all its features.

That said, I don't know if that's a problem, either. Windows does exactly that for its file picker - it's basically embedded Explorer, complete with context menu integration etc. And it works.

I don't have image previews ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com