Tails 5.0 Anonymous OS Officially Released, Based on Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye”

Tails 5.0

The Tails developers proudly announced today the release and general availability of Tails 5.0 as a major version of this Debian-based distribution for anonymous surfing of the Internet.

It’s been more than two and a half years since the release of the Tails 4.x series, which was based on the Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” operating system series, and Tails 5.0 is here to provide users with a more up-to-date system based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system series.

This means that several core components and default apps have been bumped to newer versions from the Debian GNU/Linux 11 repositories, including the GNOME desktop environment, from version 3.30 to 3.38, which now ships with the Activities overview for accessing windows and apps.

Other major application updates include the LibreOffice 7.0 office suite from version 6.1, GIMP 2.10.22 image viewer from version 2.10.8, Inkscape 1.0 SVG editor from version 0.92, Audacity 2.4.2 audio editor from version 2.2.2, as well as MAT 0.12 metadata removal tool from version 0.8.

A new package has been added in Tails 5.0 to make it easier to encrypt text and files, namely Kleopatra, which is a certificate manager and graphical user interface for the popular GnuPG complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP protocol.

“The OpenPGP Applet was not actively developed anymore and was complicated for us to keep in Tails. The Password and Keys utility was also poorly maintained and Tails users suffered from too many of its issues until now. Kleopatra provides equivalent features in a single tool and is more actively developed,” explained the devs.

Other noteworthy changes of the Tails 5.0 release include the enablement of the Additional Software feature of the Persistent Storage by default to make it easier and quicker for users to configure additional software packages, the latest Tor Browser 11.0.11 anonymous web browser, improved support for VeraCrypt encrypted volumes, as well driverless printing and scanning support.

For more details and a list of known issues, please visit the release announcement page, from where you can also download Tails 5.0 as an ISO image for running in a virtual machine or a USB image for writing the distribution on a USB flash drive. The next release, Tails 5.1, is currently scheduled for the end of the month, on May 31st, 2022.

Last updated 2 years ago

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