Comment by dathinab

> A lot of this stuff was "decided" back

But the time where the overhead mattered in any way is over since well over a decade.

Even when e.g. GTK3/QT5 was released the overhead of a out-of-process file chooser was more then irrelevant.

> makes sense if you're trying to appease app developers,

I have yet to see a single application which uses that for any reassemble thing which couldn't also work with a native file chooser (e.g. custom preview images) or can be handled well outside of the file chooser (but then I'm on Linux since quite a while, but this is about Linux in the end).

I have been hearing complains about non-native file chooser pretty much since I started using Linux 12? years ago. In difference to very few Linux programs customizing anything but filters in a file chooser.

So I don't buy that it's inconvenient for developers to any relevant degree (wrt. Linux) the very few application which insist on it still can roll their own file picker by using on of the "guaranteed to pop up" custom file picker libraries.

One the other hand having file picking as a system service would have lead to more consistent appearance, more convenience (consistent system interactions) and more accessibility (e.g. alternative system file picker specialized for blind people).

So you will have a hard time convincing me that it wasn't dump to not switch to native file picker around a decade ago when GTK3/QT5 came out, sure there where reasons, but there had been much more reasons in favor of it then against. It's just not a decision anyone ever did actively I guess, because not making a decision is easier then people across distros/GUI frameworks agreeing to making a decision.