The project will get a new homepage and outreach material

Dec 2, 2019 23:27 GMT  ·  By

The Tails project, which develops the Debian-based Tails amnesic incognito live operating system, has announced today some of their major plans for 2020 to improve the anonymous OS used by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden to stay hidden online.

In 2020, the Tails project plans to release numerous updates to its Tails anonymous OS, some of which will be major ones implementing big new features like support for Secure Boot to offer better compatibility with more hardware components, thus making it easier to start Tails on PCs and Macs.

While Secure Boot support is planned for July 2020, when the Tails 4.9 release should hit the streets, the project also aims to deal with the manual upgrades as soon as January 2020. These manual upgrades have been bugging users for a long time now, but Tails wants to make the upgrade process less painful, lighter and more robust.

Additionally, the project wants to revamp their website to make it more easy for non-technical users to understand how Tails works. "For the less technical part of our target audience, Tails is a technological object like nothing they have used before," explain the devs. "To make sure that the new explanation of Tails makes sense to less tech-savvy users, we will use user-centered design techniques and work with professional graphic designers."

Tails OS release schedule for 2020

Next year, the Tails project aims to release no less than ten versions, starting with Tails 4.2 in January 2020, and continuing with Tails 4.3 on February, Tails 4.4 on March, Tails 4.5 on April, Tails 4.6 on May, as well as Tails 4.7 and 4.8 on June, Tails 4.9 on July, Tails 4.10 on August, and last but not least Tails 4.11 on September 2020.

Meanwhile, we're expecting Tails to launch Tails OS 4.1 as soon as tomorrow, December 3rd, a bugfix release that ships with an updated TOR Browser based on the Firefox 68.3 ESR web browser. As with most Open Source and Free projects, Tails counts on your donations, so please consider donating to Tails if you're using this priceless privacy tool.