Re: [Tails-dev] Question: Tails in undercover mode?

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Author: geb
Date:  
To: tails-dev
Subject: Re: [Tails-dev] Question: Tails in undercover mode?
Hello,

Hans:
> Dear list,
>
> I am wondering, why tails no more get an undercover mode. IMO it is very
> dangerous for users, if their window manager is not looking like the normal
> window manager used everywhere, especially in countries, where any "strange"
> desktop might cause attention on authorities.
>
> This problem could be easily solved. Most users are running either windows or
> MacOS. For windows you can just use XFCE + kali-undercover, for Mac-design
> there are several windowmanagers available (there is coming ElementaryOS in my
> mind).
>
> As you do only need the window-manager design, there should be no risk change.
>
> I might remember, tails got this option some years ago, but somehow this is
> gone. Dunno why....


This camouflage option has been removed because the theme that proposed
this feature was not working anymore, and because of lack of resources
to work on it. You can read a bit more about that here :

https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/tails/-/issues/10830

https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/blueprints/-/wikis/update_camouflage_for_jessie/

Unfortunately, the problem is not that easy to solve. As you can see on
the previous links, reintroducing this feature using gnome themes would
requires lot of work (at least at the moment these links were updated).

Proposing other desktop-environments may looks simpler, but it would
requires even more work, for UX, documentation, testing, ensuring
everything works fine, keeping the image small enough etc, not only when
integrating these desktop environments, but also for every releases.

That said, maybe things have improved since last updates on the previous
links. So if you are interested to give a deeper look of how it could be
done in practice, that may be a small but important step :-). I did a
quick testing of https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1216281/ (which is nice
also because it has been maintained since a few years now). It seems the
menus are only for Cinnamon, but maybe I did not tested it enough.

--
geb