Charles is 30 years old and lives in North America. He is a political activist working on law reform at the state level. He cares about free software and calls himself a "purist". He is part of an organization that provides computers and cell phones with free software (libreboot, Replicant) to people.

Around 2012, Bill Binney's revelations about the amount of spying done by the US government shocked him and prompted him to re-evaluate his decisions about how he kept control of his data & communication. This made him start to use Tor and Tails.

Since three years, Charles uses Tails daily. He submits bug reports and sends suggestions to the developers. He is a power-user at ease in a terminal; he installs additional packages to adapt Tails to his needs. He mainly uses Tails for IRC and XMPP chat, email, web browsing, and SSH.

Things he likes:

  1. He has a sense of trust in the people who work on the Tails project, and particularly about the fact they will make decisions that will be in his best interest.
  2. Something he calls "usability": once the desired settings are in place, every time he boots Tails it's fresh (but customized as desired).
  3. Tor is integrated system-wide by default, which avoids the need to configure another OS to achieve this goal.

Things he dislike:

  1. Tails lacks support for next-generation IM (e.g. OMEMO); he is aware that this support might be available via Additional Software Packages already, but he thinks it should be available by default.
  2. Charles misses a really free software version of Tails (Linux Libre kernel, no firmware).
  3. Charles misses support for server-related features (XMPP server, Media Goblin, Mumble).