Improvements to automatic upgrades

We worked on important improvements to the automatic upgrade feature, which is still one of your major pain points when using Tails:

Until now, if your version of Tails was several months old, you sometimes had to do 2 or more automatic upgrades in a row. For example, to upgrade from Tails 3.12 to Tails 3.16, you first had to upgrade to Tails 3.14.

Starting with 4.2, direct automatic upgrades will be available from all prior versions to the latest version.
Until now, you could only do a limited number of automatic upgrades, after which you had to do a much more complicated "manual" upgrade.

Starting with 4.2, you will only have to do a manual upgrade between major versions, for example to upgrade to Tails 5.0 in 2021.
We made automatic upgrades use less memory.
We optimized a bit the size of the download when doing automatic upgrades.

New features

We included several command line tools used by SecureDrop users to analyze the metadata of leaked documents on computers that cannot use the Additional Software feature:
- PDF Redact Tools to redact and strip metadata from text documents before publishing
- Tesseract OCR to convert images containing text into a text document
- FFmpeg to record and convert audio and video

Open ~/Persistent/keepassx.kdbx by default when starting KeePassX. If this database does not exist yet, stop pointing to it in the list of recent databases.

For more details, read our changelog.

None specific to this release.

Automatic upgrades are available from 4.0, 4.1, and 4.1.1 to 4.2.
If you cannot do an automatic upgrade or if Tails fails to start after an automatic upgrade, please try to do a manual upgrade.

Follow our installation instructions:

All the data on this USB stick will be lost.

If you don't need installation or upgrade instructions, you can directly download Tails 4.2:

Tails 4.3 is scheduled for February 11.

We need your help and there are many ways to contribute to Tails (donating is only one of them). Come talk to us!