El FOSS It has all kinds of benefits, those of us who use it are very clear about it and we enjoy it. However, sometimes, due to the lack of a single authority that decides the progress of an entire project (as may be the case in a company such as Microsoft or Apple) there are imbalances that end up harming the end user, and we have witnessed as sometimes an update had to be left for a future version of a distro because enough tests had not yet been carried out when preparing its launch.
A similar case occupies us now, since in Canonical They have decided to cut their losses and include an old version of Nautilus in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. It is clear that being LTS is supposed to be extremely stable and therefore the developers have preferred to use Nautilus 3.14.3, considered very reliable by all who have used it, and leaving aside the most recent file explorer version 3.18, which was originally planned. And in this case it must be said that just as Canonical has been criticized many times for not listening to its users or for deciding without much regard for their opinion, this time they have decided precisely based on the very bad reviews that Nautilus 3.18 has been getting.
Is that to start the developers of GNOME They have updated the file explorer with some interface changes that have been well received, but along with this have come some bugs that are not acceptable for users and that have greatly reduced its performance. Something too important if we take into account that it is one of the applications that are used the most on a daily basis. So Sebastian Bacher, one of Canonical's devs, explains that "the new version will need more work, which will not happen in this cycle", and explains that although some problems are being solved (such as those brought by the new file copy dialog) but that these in turn They require certain changes to the interface and that is what the GNOME developers are now working on (and only when they finish, can Canonical's developers start doing the same).
As we can see, the fact of relying on third-party software (in this case, GNOME) makes Canonical have to adapt to the situation and have to opt for a more conservative approach, as they have intelligently done in this case. Thus, users gain peace of mind and stability, although they lose the advantages of having a newer application.
Nautilus is outdated in itself, Ubuntu should use Nemo and stop crap.