The anonymizing Linux Tails has been released in version 6.0. The biggest changes concern the substructure: Tails 6 is based on Debian 12 (Bootworm) and Gnome 43 and is therefore up to date.
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The new version also brings new versions of almost all integrated software and provides several important security and usability improvements. This is what the distribution developers write in the release notes for Tails 6.0.
Tails 6.0 with new features
Tails 6.0 now warns if errors occur while reading or writing to the USB stick. The error detection is intended to help “create a backup of the persistent storage at an early stage before it is too late”. The distribution also automatically integrates external USB storage devices such as USB sticks or external hard drives. If they are encrypted, Tails also automatically offers to unlock the encryption, for example for Veracrypt-encrypted partitions.
To protect against malicious USB devices, Tails ignores them if they are plugged in while away from the computer. If the screen is locked, this protection mechanism takes effect. Diceware can now create passphrases for persistent storage in five additional languages. German, Italian, Catalan, Portuguese and Spanish are new.
The Tails maintainers have also worked on the surface. There is now a dark mode, a mode called Night Light with darkened “light” colors that are less dazzling, and the standard light mode. Gnome 43 adds an easier option for screenshots and screen video recordings. Thanks to optimizations of Gmail and Thunderbird, Gmail accounts can now be used much more easily in Tails, the maintainers continue.
The important packages are included in current versions. Tor Browser 13.0.10, Electrum 4.3.4, KeePassXC 2.7.4, Metadata Cleaer 2.4.0. Useful programs for other work on the computer are also up to date. Inkscape 1.2.2, Audacity 3.2.4, Gimp 2.10.34 and Kleopatra 4.22.12.
Removed icons from desktop
To do this, the developers removed the icons from the desktop in Tails 6.0 because the shell extension used for this was not well integrated into Gnome and caused further problems. Since securely wiping USB sticks and SSDs isn't reliable enough, they've also removed the “Wipe” and “Wipe available disk space” entries from the file browser's shortcut menu. The “Remove Metadata” option was also removed because the developers of MAT2 – the library that Metadata Cleaner uses – no longer offer it. GtkHash is no longer set up by default, but can still be installed as additional software.
Tails 6.0 can be downloaded as usual for USB sticks and as an ISO image for DVDs and virtual machines. Just at the beginning of the month, the Tails project maintainers announced version 6 with the release of version 5.22. The last version of 5 to date had updated the central Tor software and Thunderbird in particular.
(dmk)