Tails 5.0 Beta (1) is Now Available for Testing, Based on Debian 11

The Tails team announced that the upcoming Tails 5.0 Beta (1) is now available and is ready for testing.

Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) is a Debian based live distribution that follows the Debian stable branch. It is popular because it promises complete Internet anonymity. It uses the Tor network, which is very hard to trace. This Linux distribution provides all pre-loaded applications keeping the security and traffic anonymity in mind.

Tails 5.0 Beta 1

The upcoming Tails 5.0 is the first release based on Debian 11 Bullseye, released last year. This release brings updated packages and programs as per Debian’s repo and is powered by Linux Kernel 5.10.

Moreover, on the desktop front, you get GNOME 3.38 with applications such as Audacity 2.4.2 and GIMP 2.20.x, LibreOffice 7.0.4 and Thunderbird email client 91.7.x.

In addition to that, Tor Browser is updated to 11.0.10 stable, which is the latest stable version for Tor in Linux.

Furthermore, the driverless printing and scanning add value to the Tails 5.0 beta release, which helps people who use Tails for a specific workload.

Tails 5.0 beta also removes python2 dependencies and adopts python3 (almost all Linux distros moved away from python2 by now) and a feature that makes Tor log the traffic and other information to the system journal.

The NetworkManager now uses the internal DHCP client, and a handful of bug fixes and translation updates enrich the Tails 5.0 release.

Finally, if you would like to contribute to the testing, download the ISO file below. And then try it on a virtual machine or physical system. Don’t forget to report any issues you find on the public mailing list tails-testers@boum.org to get help.