Software Update: Tails 4.2

Tails stands for “The amnesic incognito live system” and is a live Linux distribution that focuses on privacy and anonymity. It uses Debian GNU/Linux as its base and adds a Gnome environment with Tor, Tor Browser, Pidgin, Thunderbird, Electrum, LibreOffice, GPG and KeePassXC. For more information, please refer to this page. The development team has released version 4.2 with the following announcement:

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 Editor 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

Changes and upgrades

• Update Tor Browser to 9.0.3.
• Update Thunderbird to 68.3.0.
• Update Linux to 5.3.15.

Fixed problems

• 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.