Mostly, it's the developers and those who pay them. Almost nobody is developing X11 anymore, they've moved on to Wayland. And GTK devs don't want to support it.

The code is still there (FOSS), so you can continue using it as long as you want — and even maintain/sponsor if you like. None of us is entitled to developer time (from others), so if the ecosystem moves and they wish to invest their effort on different endeavors or approaches, we can’t hold them back.

But I've said this elsewhere. Yes, we can criticize what they are doing even if we are not paying them. We can't sue them, we can't take way their money, and that is 100% fair, of course we shouldn't be able to do that.

But yes, I can absolutely say "Y'all are wasting a ton of time with this Wayland way y'all are doing things, you should go fix X instead."

So the answer to "who gets to be the one who decides this", remains "the one writing the code" and "the one choosing what to install", independent of each other.

While it's true no one can stop you telling people they should be working on what you want and not what they find valuable, you sound like a petulant child demanding people do things for you.

Sorry, your name calling here doesn't hold up at all. How they operate directly affects my work. I onboard people to Linux and this Wayland discrepancy is an annoyance I'd rather not deal with.

What I'm doing is pretty similar to dealing with, e.g. a land developer putting up a big shopping center near my quiet neighborhood. I don't have much legal recourse here, but someone who speaks against it isn't childish.

You write off the things other people care about as "pathetic" elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31973526) in this thread, your point of view seems to boil down to "things I care about should be tailored to, and other people's cares are worthless", which yes, is pretty childish.

I'll happily defend it.

I believe a free/open source desktop OS that's easy for "regular" people to use is VERY important. One of the "selling" points is "stuff doesn't break, it will work the same way it does today as it will tomorrow." This could improve the user experience for a lot of people, this could get more people interested in tech, this could save a lot of e-waste. Again, this isn't mere ideas for me -- I do this with lots of people all the time.

Now sure, you could get on your tech high horse and say "well, all those newbs should catch up." Yes, I think the people who focus too strongly on comparatively small things like fractional scaling aren't seeing the bigger picture. And that is pathetic.

Except regular people want to be able to watch a video without screen tearing, or use their nice new monitor at a resolution that suits their needs without the UI being tiny/huge. It doesn't matter if the user experience is consistent, if it is consistently not what they need, they'll still switch away.

Not breaking stuff is a great goal, but it is a trade off, there is a cost to supporting the old, and it isn't always worth paying. Just sounds like your priorities don't line up with the people actually paying and doing the work. Your attempts to convince that it's a better option by telling them they are stupid actually are misguided if you think that'll actually work.