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 also working on adding compiler hardening options to more Debian packages included in Tails; another security feature that Ubuntu already provides.
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.
Add-ons can do many things within the browser, and even if all the networking goes through Tor, some add-ons might interact badly with the rest of the configuration or leak private information.
Unless proven otherwise, no add-on, apart from the ones already included in Tails, have been seriously audited and should be considered safe to use in this context.
