[Tails-testers] [Tails-news] Our plans for 2020

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Author: Tails - News
Date:  
To: amnesia-news
Subject: [Tails-testers] [Tails-news] Our plans for 2020
On October 7, we launched our donation campaign by explaining [why supporting
Tails is more important than
ever](https://tails.boum.org/news/2019-fundraiser/index.en.html). On October
31, we summarized [what we did in 2019 to make Tails easier to adopt by new
users](https://tails.boum.org/news/achievements_in_2019/index.en.html). Today
we pass on to you our plans for 2020.

But first, we are pleased that the donation campaign has been pretty
successful so far. We received around 50 000 € already, which is 69% more than
last year. Still, these good results are due to some large donations and fewer
people have been donating so far, 16% less than in 2018. We hope that after
reading this post many of you will consider [donating to
Tails](https://tails.boum.org/donate/?r=plans2020).

# Less manual upgrades (January 2020)

Tails ships an automatic upgrade mechanism since 2013. But this mechanism only
works for a limited amount of upgrades, after which a ["manual"
upgrade](https://tails.boum.org/doc/upgrade/index.en.html#manual) is needed.

These manual upgrades are a major pain point and we know that users often
think their Tails is "broken" when automatic upgrades are not possible
anymore.

In 2020, we will remove the need for most of these manual upgrades. And as
automatic upgrades are also often too painful we will research ways to make
them lighter and more robust.

# New homepage and outreach material (April 2020)

Leveraging all the work that we have done in the past years to make Tails
easier to install and use, in 2020, we will explain better what Tails is and
why people should use it.

The text on our Home and About pages have not changed significantly since
2011. It is too verbose, too technical for most people, and not sufficiently
engaging visually. Since then Tails has come a long way: the number of people
using Tails has been multiplied by 16. Tails is no longer an experimental
project for privacy experts but a well-established reference.

For the less technical part of our target audience, Tails is a technological
object like nothing they have used before. Some of the core concepts of Tails
are particularly innovative and hard to understand before using it:

* Tails is a full operating system that is started from a USB stick.

* Tails forgets everything by default.

To make sure that the new explanation of Tails makes sense to less tech-savvy
users, we will use [user-centered](https://simplysecure.org/blog/formative-
testing) [design techniques](https://simplysecure.org/blog/branding-tails) and
work with [professional graphic
designers](https://tails.boum.org/jobs/illustrations_how_tails_work/).

To reach critical communities of users and digital security trainers
worldwide, we will also print outreach materials based on this new
explanation, make it available in 4 languages, and send it to partner
organizations worldwide.

If your organization works with journalists, activists, or human-defenders and
is interested in receiving leaflets about Tails in 2020, please [get in touch
with us](mailto:sajolida@pimienta.org).

# Secure Boot for better hardware support (July 2020)

In 2019, we worked on making it much easier for users to start Tails on Mac
and as a consequence, their numbers more than doubled.

For years, Secure Boot has been among the main sources of issues reported to
our help desk and prevented less tech-savvy users to adopt Tails.

Currently, many have to learn how to disable Secure Boot on their computer.
This process is slightly different on every computer, is very complicated to
learn on your own, and can lead to scary problems on Windows computers, for
example [_BitLocker_ asking you for a recovery
key](https://redmine.tails.boum.org/code/issues/15016#note-19).

Next year, we will add support for Secure Boot to Tails, making it easier to
start on PC, for which 90% of people download Tails.

**In 2020, we will keep the focus on improving Tails usability and outreaching to the people the most in need of digital security. If you also think that this is important, please take a moment to donate to Tails.**

[Donate](https://tails.boum.org/donate/?r=plans2020)



URL: https://tails.boum.org/news/plans_for_2020/index.en.html
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