The desktop environment has been switched to GNOME Shell

Jan 27, 2016 03:30 GMT  ·  By

The Tails development team has proudly announced the immediate availability for download of the final Tails 2.0 build, the most promising release of the amnesic incognito live system.

Based on the latest and greatest Debian GNU/Linux 8 (Jessie) operating system, which upgrades most of the core components to their most recent versions available at the moment of writing this article, Tails 2.0 now uses the Classic mode of the modern GNOME 3 desktop environment with the GNOME Shell interface.

Until today, Tails has used the GNOME 3.4 desktop environment, which we have to admit was pretty old, but version 2.0 changes that, and it upgrades all the GNOME apps and core components from version 3.4 to 3.14, including Nautilus, Videos, Disks, etc.

In addition to the updated GNOME components, Tails 2.0 ships with the latest versions of most common applications, among which we can mention the LibreOffice 4.3 office suite, PiTiVi 0.93 video editor, Liferea 1.10 RSS feed reader, Poedit 1.6.10 text editor, and Git 2.1.4 distributed versioning software.

Now based on TOR Browser 5.5

Another interesting feature of Tails 2.0 is the inclusion of the latest Tor Browser 5.5 anonymous web browser, which is based on the ESR version of the Mozilla Firefox 38.6.0 web browser. Moreover, the Windows camouflage feature has been currently disabled in this release due to incompatibilities with GNOME Shell.

systemd is now used as the default init system, and there's better hardware support in Tails 2.0. Additionally, Icedove is now the default e-mail and news client, replacing Claws Mail, and users will now be notified when running the Live CD from a non-free virtualization software piece.

Several issues have been addressed in this release as well, and as such, there are improvements to the HiDPI support, Vidalia is now closed when Tor starts, the Videos (Totem) application can now access the DVD drive, and printers can be configured without root access. Download Tails 2.0 right now from Softpedia.