For all intents and purposes - no. The only thing that changes is where plugins under the keyboardio umbrella are. The architecture remains unchanged, we have no intention of moving away from plugins.
It’s going to remain plugin based, but the plugins that used to be in Kaleidoiscope-Bundle-Keyboardio (and formerly Arduino-Boards) are getting merged into Kaleidoscope itself. They’re still functionally separate, they still use the same plugin APIs as external plugins, those are not going anywhere, because it’s a core part of what makes Kaleidoscope awesome. We’re merely rearranging the sources, moving them into Kaleidoscope, to make it easier to contribute.
Plenty of people expressed frustration that working with the many small plugins was a barrier of entry, and it would’ve been much easier if it were just one repo. They liked the plugin architecture, just not the split into multiple repos. So we started merging the plugins, to remove that barrier, while still keeping the same architecture. This has a bunch of other benefits too, like plugin documentation being in one place, being able to do cross-plugin changes more easily, reducing the amount of submodules used (submodules are a bit awkward to work with, in my opinion).
An interesting note: while merging the plugins, we merged histories too.
No, all plugins under the keyboardio/ umbrella are going to move into Kaleidoscope. I’ll emphasize again: this is not a move towards a monolithic architecture, just a monolithic repository, with the plugin architecture kept as-is. We’re even building new things on the plugin architecture (like the recent onFocusEvent event, and there’s more coming!).
Yep, it’s ok to delete your local copies! They were also removed from the Kaleidoscope-Bundle-Keyboardio repo too, and are getting archived on GitHub as well.