Releases

The following changes will be introduced in Tails 3.6:

  • Upgrade Tor to 3.2.9.

  • Upgrade Linux kernel to 4.15.0.

  • Upgrade Thunderbird to 52.6.0 and enable its apparmor profile.

  • Upgrade Electrum to 3.0.6.

  • Add support for screen locking, even without administration password.

  • Upgrade tails-additional-softwares, which does not block anymore the opening of the Desktop while installing the packages, and is more robust when booting in offline mode.

  • Upgrade Tails installer to fix bugs when using it in languages different than english.

  • Upgrade OpenPGP Applet, it does not hang anymore when decrypting large text from the clipboard.

Code

Documentation and website

  • We've improved the contributor's documentation for verifying reproducible ISO builds.

  • We improved our installation instructions for Windows to prevent people from skipping the Fat32 Format option of Universal USB Installer.

  • We fixed our installation instructions for Ubuntu after the removal of the splash screen of Tails Installer.

User experience

  • We rethought in depth the installation process and made plans to distribute USB images in addition to ISO images. Doing so will drastically simplify the installation for Windows and macOS and improve support for UEFI computers.

  • We made plans to improve the user experience of Tails upgrades:

    • on the short term, we will make automatic upgrades more powerful to remove the need for any manual upgrade (except when releasing a version of Tails based on a new Debian release): #15281, Endless_upgrades
    • on the long term, we want to research existing system upgrade technologies
  • We simplified the manual upgrade instructions from Tails to remove a whole step. Doing a manual upgrade should now be less confusing and take half the time!

  • We designed an error message when Tails is incompatible with a given graphics card. It will help users understand the failure better and get better help from our help desk.

Hot topics on our help desk

  1. Users are still complaining about Electrum being outdated

  2. A lot of reports are about the Tails Installer Unicode issue

Funding

Outreach

Past events

Upcoming events

In March some Tails contributors will attend

Translation

Our website can be read in Spanish again, after some years in which the translation was discontinued. We thank all translators for their efforts!

All the website

  • de: 51% (2808) strings translated, 7% strings fuzzy, 45% words translated
  • es: 44% (2419) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 34% words translated
  • fa: 38% (2070) strings translated, 10% strings fuzzy, 40% words translated
  • fr: 90% (4916) strings translated, 1% strings fuzzy, 88% words translated
  • it: 34% (1889) strings translated, 6% strings fuzzy, 30% words translated
  • pt: 22% (1244) strings translated, 9% strings fuzzy, 19% words translated

Total original words: 57937

Core pages of the website

  • de: 75% (1422) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 74% words translated
  • es: 93% (1768) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy, 89% words translated
  • fa: 33% (636) strings translated, 11% strings fuzzy, 33% words translated
  • fr: 97% (1845) strings translated, 2% strings fuzzy, 95% words translated
  • it: 69% (1312) strings translated, 14% strings fuzzy, 68% words translated
  • pt: 41% (780) strings translated, 15% strings fuzzy, 41% words translated

Total original words: 17280

Metrics

  • Tails has been started more than 570.813 times this month. This makes 20.386 boots a day on average.
  • 7.587 downloads of the OpenPGP signature of Tails ISO from our website.
  • 75 bug reports were received through WhisperBack.