If George Orwell was alive today, would he be an Internet troll?

In 2017, a German organisation, FSFE e.V, elected me as their community representative. They had this odd approach to membership, approximately 28 people had been registered as members of the assocation. Their 1500 volunteers and donors were invited to join but kept off the books. As the organization's contempt for membership became apparent, I started to feel Orwell's animals coming to life. As he wrote all those years ago, All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. In FSFE's case, we could say all Fellows are equal but some Fellows are more equal than others. [...] Animal Farm is only one side of the Orwellian coin, the other being his uncannily accurate tour-de-force of the modern surveillance state, Nineteen-Eighty-Four. All of the organizations mentioned above (Debian, FSFE) are secretly funded by Google. Would you be less surprised to find a bible in a church than to find Nineteen-Eighty-Four under the pillows of Google's founders? One of the most startling discoveries during my time as community representative was the extent to which all of these organizations had built their budgets around recurring annual contributions from Google. Their experiments in demotions arose at exactly the same time that women in Google's workforce who spoke up against harassment found themselves being publicly demoted and humiliated. It was revealed that one of the organizations, Debian, had secretly banked $300,000 from Google under the radar at the same time that attention was on an identical-sized donation from a non-profit, the Handshake Foundation. What a convenient cover. After Linux Foundation and FSFE had decided to eliminate their annual elections, Google's money had a community representative "demoted" to a lower status in Debian just days before the call for nominations in leadership elections.

Games: Chromebooks, Lucky Lanterns in Rocket League, Crumble

• Thanks to Linux, Google and Valve are Bringing Steam to Chromebooks

  In yet another win for desktop Linux, Google and Steam are about to up the chromebook gaming field. On many supported chromebooks, it is already possible to run Linux applications on the chromebook. For certain user types, this has been a real boon. However, for gamers, not so much. That is about to change, thanks to a joint effort by Google and Valve. According to Kan Liu, Director of Product Management for Google Chrome OS, Steam is coming to chromebooks. What is Steam? Steam is a digital video game distribution service, offered by Valve, originally released in 2003 as a means for Valve to provide automatic updates for their own line of games. Eventually the service was expanded to include third-party publishers and is now one of the largest digital distribution systems for games.

• Lucky Lanterns event is now live in Rocket League and there's a brand new arena

  Psyonix have put the Lucky Lanterns event live now in Rocket League. No update is needed today, as one went out a few days ago to prepare for it. Working just like previous events, giving you a special currency for playing which you can then redeem for special customization items. This time around though, there's no special game mode to play. Instead, there's an entirely new arena called The Forbidden Temple Arena.

• Amusing sticky-tongue physics platformer 'Crumble' has a big demo update, now with multiplayer

  A rolling-ball physics platformer where you move like slime, jump like a bouncy ball and swing using a sticky tongue like a weird version of Spider Man. Crumble has a lot of fun ideas going for it and a big demo update is out now with co-op. Covered a few times here now, as I've absolutely loved following the progress on this one. The developer posts a lot of upcoming bits for it on Twitter, and it looks like they have some pretty amusing plans for Crumble. Including a portal that turns you into a shadow that completely warps the gameplay.

Screencasts/Audiocasts/Shows: MX Linux, Linux Headlines, Going Linux, File Systems and Linux Action News

• VIDEO: MX Linux 19 Features and Desktop Tour

  MX Linux is a Linux distribution based on Debian stable and using core antiX components. The distributions MX Tools is very popular among users and combined with other several ready-to-use tools, it is great for users who prefer to tweak their distro to their liking. In this video, we will take you through the features tour showing casing MX Linux 19.

• 2020-01-20 | Linux Headlines

  Nextcloud follows up with good news for mobile users, breaking a Kubernetes install on purpose, and the amicable resolution for recent concerns in the Rust community.

• Going Linux #384 · 2019 Year In Review

  In our annual review of the previous year we discuss Larry's books on Ubuntu MATE, Microsoft's transformation into an open source company, the distros we've tried, and predictions for 2020. We read a couple of emails from listeners and recommend podcasts and Linux applications.

• File Systems | Which One is the Best? ZFS, BTRFS, or EXT4

  Let's go over File Systems in this video. We will determine which one is the best ZFS, BTRFS, and EXT4. Each one might work for you based on YOUR needs!

• Linux Action News 141

  Nextcloud's new release is so big it gets a rebrand, why Mozilla had a round of lay-offs, and the real possibility of Steam coming to Chrome OS. Plus, the sad loss of a community member, and more.