Rivalling Whonix for the position of best OS for accessing the darkweb is TAILS. The Amnesic Incognito Live System or TAILS is a live system that protects your privacy and anonymity which is essential for browsing the deep and dark web, but unlike Whonix, which runs on virtual machines, TAILS is made for live booting off of a USB, DVD or SD card. This may sound like a hassle at first but it’s worth it for the additional features that TAILS provides to protect your identity.
Like Whonix, TAILS also run on TOR and all the in-built software is configured to automatically use TOR to connect to the internet. The best feature of this OS though is that it does not store anything on your hard drive at all. Sensitive documents can be stored on the hard drive providing you grant the permission for that but anything other than that will be gone without a trace.
To get started you can download TAILS latest version from their official website. They have a direct download link as well as a torrent mirror.
After that you will have to verify the integrity of the ISO image to make sure you are not the victim of any malicious attacks. If you already understand OpenPGP then this should be easy but if not then they have a guide that will walk you through.
You will then be prompted to either use TAILS installer to put the OS onto a USB drive or SD card or burn it to a DVD.
Now insert the device you just burned TAILS to and restart your computer. If the OS doesn’t boot up then you will have to access your BIOS menu and change the boot order and set your TAILS drive as first priority. Once that is done restart your computer and you should boot into TAILS.
The usage of TAILS is pretty self explanatory and simple. If this is too much of a hassle for you then Whonix is a good alternative which runs on a Virtual Machine so you can use it in the background while working in your primary OS. Browsing TOR on a default operating system isn’t recommended.
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