One of the most popular privacy focused Linux distributions, Tails has released version 3.0, based on Debian 9. The release comes three days before the official release of Debian 9.
This is the first time a new version of Tails is released almost at the same time as the new version of Debian which it is based on. Debian 9 will officially be released on June 17, 2017.
According to the release statement, Tails 3.0 was released earlier than Debian 9 because users could benefit from the changes in Debian earlier as well as to “detect and fix issues in the new version of Debian while it is still in development so that our work also benefits Debian earlier.”
The release has fixed so many security issues that affected Tails 2.12. Users are advised to upgrade to Tails 3.0 as soon as possible.
Tails 3.0 comes in with in-depth security improvements, a lot of changes to the desktop, major software upgrades and most of all a new startup and shutdown experience.
Some of the known issues recorded include Tails Installer that erroneously rejects some USB sticks; failure of Tails to start on some devices with Intel graphical hardware; migration problems reported by those who want to migrate from Icedove to Thunderbird.
New Features in Tails 3.0
Some of the important new changes in Tails 3.0 are as following:
New startup and shutdown experience:
There is a complete redesign of the application used to configure Tails at startup. All options are now available within a single window, you can enable accessibility features from the start as well as a display of language and region settings to the benefit of international audiences.
The shutdown experience has also seen some changes. It is more reliable now since it had unpredictable results as it crashed on various computers. The screen is now more discrete, totally black and less suspicious.
A Polished Desktop:
Tail 3.0 has switched to the default GNOME black theme which makes it more modern and gives it a discrete look. New features such as the ability to extract compressed files without the help of a separate application and ability to rename many files at the same time have been added.
The notification pop-ups have been repositioned in other to make them more visible. Shortcut windows have also been added in other to discover keyboard shortcuts in GNOME applications.
32Bit support dropped:
Tails 3.0 will work only on 64-bit computers. Several other Linux distributions have dropped 32-bit support and Tails is the latest to join the list. In the news statement, “Dropping hardware support, even for a small portion of our user base, is always a hard decision to make but being 64-bit only has important security and reliability benefits.”
Upgrades and Changes:
The Pidgin tray icon has been removed from the top navigation bar. It has been replaced by popup notifications. Icedove has been renamed as Thunderbird. This change in name has been inherited from Debian.
The read-only option, that was rarely used by users and which lead to confusion and some unexpected issues, is removed. The search box and search feature that was found on the address bar of the Unsafe Browser are also removed.
Download Tails 3.0
Installation Instructions: You can get the installation instructions from here.
Upgrade: All users are required to do a manual upgrade.