Software update: Tails 5.7

Tails stands for The amnesic incognito live system and is a live Linux distribution that focuses on privacy and anonymity. It bases on Debian GNU/Linux and adds a Gnome environment with Tor, Tor Browser, Pidgin, Thunderbird, Electrum, LibreOffice, GPG and KeePassXC. For more information, we refer to this page. Version 5 is based on Debian 11 and OpenPGP has been replaced by Kleopatra, among other things. The following changes and improvements have also been made in version 5.7:

Metadata cleaner

We added Metadata Cleaner, a new tool to clean metadata from your files. When we switched to MAT 0.8.0 in Tails 4.0, MAT lost its graphical interface and was only accessible from the contextual menu of the Files browser. It became especially hard for new users of Tails to learn how to clean their files. Metadata Cleaner fixes this by providing a simple and easily discoverable graphic interface to remove metadata. Metadata Cleaner works on the same file formats and is as secure as MAT because Metadata Cleaner also uses MAT in the background to do the actual cleaning.

Changes and Updates

• Update Tor Browser to 11.5.8.
• Update tor to 0.4.7.11.
• Remove pdf-edit-tools, which was broken. (#19250)

Fixed problems

We fixed 2 minor usability issues in Tor Connection:

• Explain better how to use the Unsafe Browser to sign in to a local network. (#19168)

• Remove the (easier) and (safer) comments in the first screen. (#19166)

For more details, read our changelog.

Known issue: Progress bar of Tor Connection getting stuck around 50%

When using a custom Tor obfs4 bridge, the progress bar of Tor Connection sometimes gets stuck halfway through and becomes extremely slow. (#19173) To fix this, you can either:

• Close and reopen Tor Connection to speed up the initial connection.
• Try a different obfs4 bridge.

We believe that this issue should not happen with an up-to-date bridge running obfs4proxy version 0.0.12 or later.