Why their devs choose to upgrade toolkits this way I cannot say.

I forget the exact details but iirc Evince was a special case because rendering PDFs in GTK4 was so different that they essentially just had to rewrite the whole application. I think Gnome Papers still doesn’t support the full feature set that Evince supported (although it works well for most use cases now). This is why its still not the default for Gnome, although I think Ubuntu has decided to adopt it a little early.

Our politics are bad, FPTP is bad, but we’re not a 2 party system entirely. The Lib Dems, Greens, SNP, and Reform all manage to have a say in politics and how things are done. They all influence Labour and the Conservatives.

Yes this is definitely true. Although these days unfortunately it seems to be both the Conservatives, and Labour who are influenced by Reform. Even Labour have started parroting some of the same lines about immigration etc. I’m always disappointed about how little talk there is of stuff like cost of living, rent etc since these are often at the forefront of my mind whenever I vote.

Lords in the UK get a tax free allowance of £323 for every day they actually turn up to work. But nothing actually forces them to show up.