Tails 3.0 has been released. Upgrade time!
https://tails.boum.org/news/version_3.0/
New Features
Redesigned startup experience:
Tails Greeter, the application to configure Tails at startup, has been completely redesigned for ease of use.
All options are available from a single window.
Language and region settings are displayed first, to benefit our international audience.
Accessibility features can be enabled from the start. (This has been a long process, started three years ago with the UX team of NUMA Paris and lead only by volunteers. Join us on tails-ux@boum.org to participate in future designs!)
The shutdown experience has also been redesigned in order to be:
More reliable. It was crashing on various computers with unpredictable results.
More discrete. The screen is now totally black to look less suspicious.
Technically speaking, it is now using the freed memory poisoning feature of the Linux kernel.
Polishing The Desktop
We switched to the default black theme of GNOME which has a more modern and discrete look.
Tails 3.0 benefits from many other small improvements to the GNOME desktop:
Files has been redesigned to reduce clutter and make the interface easier to use.
Several new features have been added, such as the ability to rename multiple files at the same time and the ability to extract compressed files without needing a separate application.
The notification area has been improved to allow easy access to previous notifications. Notification popups have also been repositioned to make them more noticeable.
Shortcut windows have been added to help you discover keyboard shortcuts in GNOME applications.
For example, press Ctrl+F1 in Files to display its shortcut window.
Security Improvements In Depth
Tails 3.0 works on 64-bit computers only now and is no longer compatible with 32-bit computers. Dropping hardware support, even for a small portion of our user base, is always a hard decision to make, but being 64-bit only has important security and reliability benefits. For example, to protect against some types of security exploits, support for the NX bit is compulsory and most binaries are hardened withPIE which allows ASLR.
Check if your computer is 64-bit or 32-bit before upgrading!
Tor Browser updated to 7.0 (based on Firefox 52 ESR) which is multiprocess and paves the way to content sandboxing. This should make it harder to exploit security vulnerabilities in the browser.
Major Upgrades to Included Software
Most included software has been upgraded in Debian 9, for example:
KeePassX from 0.4.3 to 2.0.3. Your password database will be automatically migrated to the new format of KeePassX 2.
LibreOffice from 4.3.3 to 5.2.6
Inkscape from 0.48.5 to 0.92.1
Audacity from 2.0.6 to 2.1.2
Enigmail from 1.8.2 to 1.9.6
MAT from 0.5.2 to 0.6.1
Dasher from 4.11 to 5.0
git from 2.1.4 to 2.11.0
Upgrades and Changes
The Pidgin tray icon was removed from the top navigation bar and replaced by popup notifications.
Icedove was renamed to Thunderbird, its original name, inheriting this change from Debian.
The search box and search feature of the address bar of the Unsafe Browser were removed. (#12540)
The read-only option of the persistent storage was removed. It was used by very few users, created confusion and lead to unexpected issues. (#12093)
Fixed Problems
The new X.Org display server in Tails 3.0 should work on more newer graphical hardware setups than in the past.
UEFI boot has been fixed on some machines (ThinkPad X220).
MAC spoofing has been fixed on some network interfaces (TP-Link WN725N) (#12362).
Known Issues as of 3.0 Release - June 14th
Tails fails to start on some computers with Intel graphical hardware.
Some users have reported problems during the migration from Icedove to Thunderbird, in particular, that Thunderbird doesn't start.
If this happens to you, please send the Tails dev team a WhisperBack report without restarting Tails.
Edit: Electrum 2.8.0 is scheduled to be included in the Tails 3.2 release
Also a good time to freshen and rotate the backups of your keys, your USB sticks, your wallet seeds, etc.