The Amnesic Incognito Live System (Tails) is a Debian-based live DVD/USB with the goal of providing complete Internet anonymity for the user. The product ships with several Internet applications, including web browser, IRC client, mail client and instant messenger, all pre-configured with security in mind and with all traffic anonymised. To achieve this, Incognito uses the Tor network to make Internet traffic very hard to trace.
To compare the software in this project to the software available in other distributions, please see our Compare Packages page.
Notes: In case where multiple versions of a package are shipped with a distribution, only the default version appears in the table. For indication about the GNOME version, please check the "nautilus" and "gnome-shell" packages. The Apache web server is listed as "httpd" and the Linux kernel is listed as "linux". The KDE desktop is represented by the "plasma-desktop" package and the Xfce desktop by the "xfdesktop" package.
Colour scheme:green text = latest stable version, red text = development or beta version. The function determining beta versions is not 100% reliable due to a wide variety of versioning schemes.
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Version: 7.6 Rating: 9 Date: 2026-04-04 Country: France Votes: 2
Tails is my every day OS run on a disk less Dell laptop
It does everything I want my laptop to do.
it is simple to install and use
I like Thunderbird being moved into additional software, its something I use daily and additionally lucky that my email provider uses an onion address for their mail sever, which I can log into from tails...perfect..
The reason behind the move was explained perfectly well in Tails documents.
I look at the Distrowatch top ten of distributions, every now and then, apart from re inventing the wheel, new colours etc there is nothing I feel that beats Tails..
Version: 7.1 Rating: 8 Date: 2025-10-29 Votes: 23
Gnome sucks - let's be honest.
Were the developers to switch to something simple, modded how they wish, like OpenBox*, there would be a MUCH SMALLER attack surface, the users would save A LOT of RAM, more space in the distro for more software instead of Gnome bloat, and so forth.
At the very least, the user should be presented with an option at boot to use Gnome or something simpler like OpenBox*.
The failure to properly spoof MAC Address is foolish.
The included feedback program WhisperBack reports too much of the user's sensitive system information.
I've experienced a number of freezes when using 7.1 and 7.0 which never occured on previous versions.
Using a built in bridge as an alternative should be included. Instead, the user has to jump through the hoop of getting a bridge and adding it manually. Unless the network connection fails to connect to the network, in which case a default bridge is used, the user doesn't have the option built in.
There is no simple clipboard application available which is frustrating. One can be added, of course, but this really should be included by default.
* However, I don't believe OpenBox would be available because of the garbage known as Wayland.
The forced switch to Wayland was not appreciated by my older hardware. Versions 6.x and below worked, 7.0 and 7.1 does not!
Tails is a great operating system but here are some things that could be improved or some criticisms listed from most important to least.
Tails does NOT spoof the full MAC Address which is something that many operating systems now support like android. This means that that the OUI can be used to identify you on the WiFi network. Currently there is no way to spoof the full MAC Address.
Tails includes Ublock Origin with Tor Browser which makes Tails users fingerprint different then Tor Browser Bundle (TBB) users. Until Ublock Origin is included in TBB then Tails users browser fingerprint will be different then normal Tor Browser users. It is noted that Mullvad Browser does include Ublock Origin extension and maybe Tor Browser will add it at some time in the future.
Tails pings tails.net every time you launch the Tor Browser which this can be used to track tails users on a Tor circuit. Should give users an option to disable this.