title, and to be clear I mean for my usecase specifically. Redhat is being absorbed into IBM and i’m a little worried about how that might affect the fedora project. I’m aware that they’ve been owned by IBM for a while but we are seeing all the typical signs of a company about to go to shit thanks to bad management. I am looking into and preparing to switch in case the fedora project is messed up as well.
I use my pc mainly for gaming (so steam is required) and stuff in my browser and I have a gtx 1650 (can’t get new stuff bc i’m broke) so although I don’t need the proprietary drivers necessarily, I prefer them. I use KDE with a handful of kwin scripts (like temp virtual desktops and karousel) and some cosmetic stuff like klassy, better blur, and a custom color scheme. I need all of that to remain possible. I currently use fedora kde edition, but I have been looking into immutable distros because I don’t know what I’m doing and I want to have a much lower chance of breaking stuff (or at least a way to easily unbreak it). I also want something at least reasonably up-to-date, because I like to get new features quickly. I don’t need to get them as fast as something like arch, but ubuntu and debian are way to slow for me.
what do y’all think would work best for me? I’ve looked at a few things but I haven’t been able to find anything but fedora that serves my usecase the way I want it to yet.
Legal, hr, finance, and accounting is now IBM, and IBM has noted job cuts as part of the cost savings in its profit forecasting.
Engineering, product, sales, and marketing are not making any changes - yet.
I would note that IBM is also now pushing its “enhanced AI” support over speaking with actual people, unless you have an upgraded support tier. Basic support tier can also no longer escalate cases.
I would agree in not needing to rush anywhere, but I would have to say this looks like the start of enshittification for sure.
Yeah, I agree. The big picture is concerning, though this latest instance just happens to not be a red flag. We’re not enshittified yet, but it’s a short jump depending on IBM’s next decisions.
Considering Red Hat’s core is development, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to merge things like legal, HR, finance, and accounting with IBM’s own departments.
The trouble is, once the parent company starts merging some departments, shareholders often push to merge more departments.
If the right people hold sway at IBM, Red Hat won’t continue that route to the point of fucking up the OS. But that’s a big “if.”
Especially since they are talking about all the money they will save cutting jobs.
Based on the time frames for this, I’m going to guess by the end of 2026 the engineering team will shrink, followed by a 2027 announcement of merging departments for better management, and RedHat basically be just IBM entirely by 2028.
If I still had any servers on RH for work, I’d be planning my moves right about now (personally I started the shift after the 2023 announcement on source code availability, finalized the last three servers in June actually).
Really quite a shame to see how things have changed.
Anyway, I’d suspect there are at least a couple years left before its a mess.
Yeah, I’m not panicking, but I agree with everything you said.
I want to believe that someone at IBM realizes what they lost if they fuck up Red Hat, but I’m sure we all know better than to count on it.
It’s just a bummer we have to have this conversation at all. Even when a corporation tries to start out on the right foot, odds are stacked in favor of enshittifying.