The full release of Ubuntu 21.10 is now out, but the developers of GTK have still not fixed the file-picker not having icons in it. This patch fixes this issue but needs more work. https://gist.github.com/wfr/c8e431a61d300b4f3d15. And it would not take too long to add the option to have either a list view or icons in the file-picker view. The user can already do this in the main GTK file manager windows. So it should not be too hard to add it to the file picker. Or does this not matter? But this release has Gnome 4.0 and Firefox Snap by default. So that makes up for it I guess? Download a copy here and see what you can make of it. The new Gnome should be better than the older releases, but I still preferred Gnome 2.32 myself.
https://releases.ubuntu.com/impish/ubuntu-21.10-desktop-amd64.iso.
But this new release is much snappier than previous versions, it runs very fast in a KVM virtual machine with 8 Gigabytes of RAM and emulated graphics. So this is a good thing. You still cannot have icons in the file picker. But the GTK developers are too lazy to implement that anytime soon. At least the speed is improved and there is a new wallpaper. The last wallpaper looked like a hairy pair of testicles, now it is a horrifying monkey staring into your soul. And why purple? At least you can make the dock much thinner and then place it on the bottom of the screen. That is very useful. And you can also change the size of the icons on the desktop. Once you change the wallpaper, the desktop is more appealing to the eye.