> The point stands. Explorer.exe 11 is nearly two decades ahead of GTK / Gnome.
No, it doesn't.
Explorer is the file manager application on Windows. The file manager application on Gnome is called Nautilus, and Nautilus has had thumbnail support for a very long time.
This is about the file picker dialog, which both on Windows and on Gnome/GTK+ is not coming from the file manager. You can say that dialog should have had for thumbnail support for longer, sure. It's also correct that Windows added thumbnail support to its file picker dialogs earlier. But Win98 did not have this, either, and Windows at least for some time did not have parity between the file manager and the file picker dialog.
It's surprisingly common for DEs across different operating systems to have several independent implementations of file lists/icon views between the file manager, the desktop background and the file picker dialogs. I think across Win, Mac, Gnome, KDE this actually describes most of these systems for most of their history.
You sometimes do find code reuse or even sharing a process between the file manager and the desktop background. Windows has done this, and Gnome also had a phase like this.
KDE recently unified the view code for the file manager (Dolphin) and the file dialogs, but the desktop background has distinct UI code (with the same directory model backend, and shared code for thumbnailing, context menus and other bits). In that case the reason is different UI frameworks (Qt widgets vs. QML).
I love how android solves such problems. Instead of making the decision of whether a file manager must somehow be able to handle file picking, every application is allowed to choose whether it can do file picking. For a file manager it would probably be trivial, but the wonderful thing about this design is that it is very flexible
No, it doesn't.
Explorer is the file manager application on Windows. The file manager application on Gnome is called Nautilus, and Nautilus has had thumbnail support for a very long time.
This is about the file picker dialog, which both on Windows and on Gnome/GTK+ is not coming from the file manager. You can say that dialog should have had for thumbnail support for longer, sure. It's also correct that Windows added thumbnail support to its file picker dialogs earlier. But Win98 did not have this, either, and Windows at least for some time did not have parity between the file manager and the file picker dialog.