Now that Red Hat is being IBM-fied, should I leave Fedora Kinoite?

There is literally zero practical reason to switch, so no one can answer that question without getting into your head and weighing the inconvenience of switching a distro against the ideological fervor and satisfaction you gain from showing those evil capitalists at Red Hat that you won't tolerate their actions by... switching off an almost entirely unrelated distro.

Personally I won't be switching away from Fedora for the foreseeable future, and think that you and half the people in this thread are being more than a little silly.

edit: Also, "now that"? This move is completely in line with Red Hat's behaviour for the past like 20 years. It will also quite literally affect nothing else but the existence of RHEL clones like Alma and Rocky, because virtually all the code and work that goes into RHEL is still upstreamed, and RHEL sources will still continue, in practice, to be publicly available, just with some delay.

just use a community-lead or non-profit foundation lead distro: NixOS (better than silverblue/kinoite in all aspects they try to sell), Arch, or Debian.

For professional usage, you generally go Ubuntu, or some RHEL derivative.

I feel like this is what it finally took to push me to Arch. I absolutely love Fedora too. I don't mind Redhat as an entity making money for their employees. What I do mind is insulting their users and having another megacorp like IBM make these actual decisions.

I'd never use a distribution that depends on some type of for-profit company in first place.

I just finished watching Jay's opinion on this very topic before I read your post. He makes some compelling points: https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=fqfyM7zE6KM

Having worked for many very large corporations in my day, I observe that no "company" can have any more integrity than the leadership in that company and the larger the company, the more leadership there is (boards of directors, shareholders, c-suite execs, etc). The more leadership, the less integrity because there isn't a single rudder guiding the ship. So, I believe nothing said by any large company because the person saying it is nothing more than the voice for that company at that particular minute and it's anyone's guess the machinations going on behind the curtain, which can and will change depending upon profitability and political goals from quarter-to-quarter. It can be no other way in large organizations (including companies, governments, tribes, etc). With smaller companies/projects, the product or service is much more likely to stick with a principal or goal because there's fewer chefs in the kitchen and the person speaking for the team is more likely to exercise integrity because they can. When I say integrity, my definition in this context is "aligning actions with words." So my take is there is a risk with hitching your wagon to any distro because larger orgs have more resources but are less likely to exercise transparency but smaller projects may have the transparency but not the resources.

I've been using Pop! for a few years and it's a small company (System76) with obvious goals to grow, which is certainly something to be cautious of because nearly every company loses their original principals when they begin striving for growth over convictions. I've been running Fedora in several VM's and I'm not planning to change that until IBM decides to pee in that project's bathwater too.

I'd wait and see, personally. Maybe make a test install of Debian stable and play around with it.

That's a personal decision and will depend on how you feel about using Fedora now. If you do decide to change have a look at openSUSE Kalpa, an immutable KDE based distro.

A good part of the fedora immutable spins that they are just base systems for running flatpak apps and if you use apps as flatpaks what distro to use as a base system doesn't matter much. Even immutability is not such a big deal as the separation between the base system and the applications. It is less about tech and more about usage habits.

As a flatpak user I can call myself a distro nomad. I've switched from Silverblue to Debian now. If you use Kinoite you can try KDE Neon + flatpaks or openSUSE Kalpa (their immutable variant with KDE).

Fedora is 100% community supported. Red Hat is the primary sponsor and offers infrastructure and funding for the project, as well as full-time employees, but that’s the extent of the relationship. Red Hat doesn’t have decision-making powers. The project’s ideals force it to be open and transparent. So, if you are happy with it, stay with it. Red Hat only sponsors the Project. They don’t make decisions for the Project

I'd say it's all up to whether your desire to distance yourself from Red Hat and it's distros is great enough to be worth the effort of backing things up and re-installing everything. If you feel better using something that isn't made by Red Hat after what's been happening, then switch. If you feel like the effort to switch from something you are already deep into using isn't quite worth it, then there's no issue in sticking with it.

@Raphael I personally recommend Debian. Never had any shit from Debian, and with the recent release of Debian 12, it's now better than ever. Now's actually the perfect time to switch to Debian....

To me, it really doesn't feel like you need to switch unless you're actually being affected by this in some way. Fedora isn't actually Red Hat, they're just sponsored by them and assisted by them in other ways because Red Hat uses them as an upstream, but the worst case scenario that I know of, is simply that Red Hat will cut ties with Fedora.

Yes.