this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Modern heads equivalent (heads.dyne.org)
submitted 1 day ago by potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fish to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I want a Tails-like LiveUSB OS like tails, but without the tor reliance. Does anyone have a suggestion? Heads is dead, last release 2018, but it resembles what I am looking for.

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[–] jamesbunagna@discuss.online 5 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

OP, could you please properly vocalize what you actually want/need?

If you don't know how, consider at least to answer the following:

  • Do you need it to be amnesiac? The very thing that defines Tails*.
  • What's wrong with Tor? Is your threat model so paranoid that you (somehow) don't even trust Tor? Or, are you not in favor of its (relatively) low bandwidth? Or, is privacy and/or security not even a thing you seek after to begin with? Or, at least not beyond what your average distro provides already*.
  • What do you intend to do with it? Daily drive it? If so, do you need persistence?
  • What does "Tails without Tor reliance" provide/offer you beyond a LiveUSB from any other distro? Or, rather, what do you hope it will provide/offer you?

FWIW, I'm afraid we might be dealing with a classic XY problem. Hopefully I'm just mistaken...

[–] potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fish 1 points 11 hours ago

I appreciate your attempt to help, but I do also realize that what I'm asking for is rather niche and may not exist.

[–] potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fish 1 points 11 hours ago

Do you need it to be amnesiac? The very thing that defines Tails*.

Yes. A persistent storage feature would be nice but isn't a requirement.

What’s wrong with Tor? Is your threat model so paranoid that you (somehow) don’t even trust Tor? Or, are you not in favor of its (relatively) low bandwidth? Or, is privacy and/or security not even a thing you seek after to begin with? Or, at least not beyond what your average distro provides already*.

The reason I don't want to use Tor is because I will only connect to plain web websites where I don't care if they know my IP. I also find that CloudFlare and other services can block Tor which sometimes causes issues with my work.

What do you intend to do with it? Daily drive it? If so, do you need persistence?

I mainly plan on isolating certain browser-based work I'm doing with other work on my computer. As I said before, persistence would be nice but is not necessary.

What does “Tails without Tor reliance” provide/offer you beyond a LiveUSB from any other distro? Or, rather, what do you hope it will provide/offer you?

I hope it would offer me a highly hardened environment to do work in, without the requirement to set it up every time on other liveusb OSes.

To put this all together, I want an amnesiac live USB hardened(browser, kernel) environment that does not use Tor.

[–] thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Given the TOR part is kinda the point of tails you may wish to expand on what exactly a "tails like live os without tor" looks like.

The standard Mint iso will boot into a live session with no persistence, click on network icon to join tge wifi and away you go. You can setup a script to install stuff that isnt on the stock build (pretty sure firefox is there but a vpn config for example).

Without a use case description that sounds like what you're asking for.

I'm sure the other distros that offer live usbs will be the same.

[–] potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fish 1 points 11 hours ago

I would like an already hardened environment from boot. That includes the kernel hardening and browser hardening that Tor has.

I get what you're saying, a live USB does 80% of that with a bit more work, but I would still like to find a solution to this out there.

If there isn't one, I'm ready to accept that and come up with my own solution.

[–] fatur0000new@lemmy.ml 1 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

but without the tor reliance.

What's wrong with TOR?

[–] potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fish 1 points 11 hours ago

It's frequently blocked by CloudFlare and other "web security" services. I find that I don't need the anonymity that it provides as much as I need working websites.

[–] warmaster@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I have experience doing exactly that with Bazzite, Aurora and Bluefin. Booting from a USB, it works perfectly out of the box. If you want to switch between any of these distros, with one command you can rebase (switch) to another distro without losing any data. Except when you switch between different desktop environments (Bluefin is GNOME based). This is how I use Linux on my work laptop, on a daily basis. I settled on Aurora on an M2 caddy.

To install it to a USB drive, you'll need two USB drives, one to boot to the installer, the other one is the target for the installation.

If you are more security minded, there's also https://secureblue.dev/ but I haven't tried it to be able to recommend it though.

The home dir on all these distros has persistance enabled.

[–] eldavi@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

distrowatch used to have this thing where you would recommend similar distro with similar themes; but i guess it disappeared for the last decade or 2; nevertheless, i would start my search there.

[–] potentiallynotfelix@lemmy.fish 2 points 1 day ago

Closest I found there is Secure-K which I might check out.