That sucks. I know what it’s like to feel like the only voice of reason when your company is shooting itself in the foot.

I see from other comments you’re already looking for a new job, which is a very good idea. From your description of this buyout, it seems very likely that you’re about 6 months to a year out from the layoff stage of the private equity playbook.

At the end of the day you’ll always have the experience you gained from building all that stuff. Perhaps you’ll get a chance to build it back even better somewhere else!

You can never be 100% sure, but there are protective factors that make it less likely, and they mostly boil down to incentive structure:

• Ownership - Is the project run by a non-profit? A for-profit company? A hobbyist? This is the best indicator of a project’s long-term trajectory, because it generally indicates the purpose behind creating it.
• Business model - How does the project make money? Donations? Subscription? One time payment? Generally models where you can outright purchase a copy of a particular version is insulated against future updates you don’t like. Donations protect against exploitation, but run the risk of the project being unsustainable and abandoned.
• Source - Open source code isn’t a silver bullet, but (especially with good licensing) it can make enshittification less likely as it’s a lot easier for dissenters to spin up a fork / competitor. It also makes it very difficult to hide sketchy stuff like data collection and back doors.
• Red flags - You should avoid anything that is SaaS, backed by an investment firm, or publicly traded. All of these involve incentive structures that encourage and reward exploitation of consumers and employees for increasing profit margins.

Yes. The Lemmy instance I’m commenting from is running on a Raspberry Pi 4. A couple things you’ll need to consider though:

• Any containers / applications you run need to be compiled for arm64. This is way more common now than it used to be, but there are still some things that only work on x86 (like many game servers)
• You should hook up external storage to your Pi. You can boot from an SSD via USB 3 and you’ll get way better performance, capacity, and write endurance than an SD card.
• RAM will likely be your first limitation. Many services can run well under 4GB, but once you start adding more, it can fill up if you’re not careful.
• You probably already knew this, but even though the Pi has WiFi, plug it into the network via Ethernet. As a rule, you should never run servers off WiFi if you can avoid it. You’ll get much better speeds and reliability.

I guess that means Besos takes his place.

Is + when they stop counting versions and just use a SaaS model?

It’s way easier to move from one Linux distro to another if Valve starts enshittifying SteamOS (which would really suck) than it is to move from Windows to Linux. Either way this is a good stepping stone that’s well supported.

Think Different Freely.

When you install Windows, you don’t really control your computer. Microsoft does.