We are deeply rooted and involved in Debian. The friendships, relationships, and technical expertise we have in Debian have many benefits for Tails, and we are not ready to build the same relationship with Ubuntu, OpenBSD, or any other distribution. See our statement about our [[contribute/relationship_with_upstream]] for details.
See also the article [Why there are so many Debian derivatives](http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2011/09/why_there_are_so_many_debian_derivatives/)by Stefano Zacchiroli.
Ubuntu adds features in ways that we find dangerous for privacy. For example Ubuntu One ([partly discontinued](http://blog.canonical.com/2014/04/02/shutting-down-ubuntu-one-file-services/))and the [Amazon ads and data leaks](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-amazon-ads-and-data-leaks).
We usually ship kernels and video drivers from [Debian backports](http://backports.debian.org/). The result is comparable to Ubuntu in terms of support for recent hardware.
We think that the general quality of the maintenance work being done on packages matters from a security perspective. Debian maintainers generally are experts in the fields their packages deal with; while it is generally not the case outside of the limited number of packages Ubuntu officially supports.
We are actively working on improving [[AppArmor support|contribute/design/application_isolation]] in Tails; a security framework that is already used in a few Ubuntu applications.
We are also working on adding compiler hardening options to more Debian packages included in Tails; another security feature that Ubuntu already provides.
We had users ask for LXDE, XFCE, MATE, KDE, and so on, but we are not going to change desktop. According to us, the main drawback of GNOME is that it requires quite a lot of resources to work properly, but it has many advantages.The GNOME Desktop is:
We are not proposing several desktop environments to choose from because we want to [[limit the amount of software included in Tails|faq#new-software]].
This is a conscious decision as this mode of operation is better for what we want to provide to Tails users: amnesia, the fact that Tails leaves no traces on the computer after a session is closed.
No. Tails provides upgrades every six weeks, that are thoroughly tested to make sure that no security feature or configuration gets broken. If you upgrade the system yourself using `apt` or <span class="application">Synaptic</span>, you might break things. Upgrading when you get a notification from <span class="application">[[Tails Upgrader|doc/upgrade]]</span> is enough.
