If you are a Tails enthusiast, trying testing versions of Tails, that preview upcoming releases and future features, is a great way to make Tails stronger. If you like playing with new features, identifying problems, and breaking things, then consider subscribing to the tails-testers@boum.org mailing list.

This is where we announce and report back on:

  • Release candidates for future releases
  • Feature previews for upcoming improvements
Do not rely on these experimental Tails images for security.
Only use them for testing purposes.

Release candidates

We sometimes publish a release candidate. It has the same features as the upcoming release but needs testing to validate that they are working correctly.

The release candidates are also announced in our news and are available online.

What you can test on them:

  • The new features, as described in the Changelog, linked from the announcement.

  • Any other feature of Tails, for example the ones listed in our manual test suite.

Feature previews

Every now and then, we also publish testing version of Tails to test more specifically a new feature we are working on.

They are available on https://nightly.tails.boum.org/ and are announced together with specific testing instructions.

Pro-active testing

To help spot bugs before we release them, you can do exploratory testing of experimental images built from our stable branch:

https://nightly.tails.boum.org/build_Tails_ISO_stable/lastSuccessful/archive/build-artifacts/

If you find a bug in one such image, that you cannot reproduce in the last released version of Tails, please report it using WhisperBack, making it clear which experimental image you are testing.