We are deeply rooted and involved in Debian. The friendships, relationships, and technical expertise we have in Debian have many benefits for Tails, and we are not ready to build the same relationship with Ubuntu, OpenBSD, or any other distribution. See our statement about our [[contribute/relationship_with_upstream]] for details.
See also the article [Why there are so many Debian derivatives](http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2011/09/why_there_are_so_many_debian_derivatives/)by Stefano Zacchiroli.
We usually ship kernels and video drivers from [Debian backports](http://backports.debian.org/). The result is comparable to Ubuntu in terms of support for recent hardware.
We think that the general quality of the maintenance work being done on packages matters from a security perspective. Debian maintainers generally are experts in the fields their packages deal with; while it is generally not the case outside of the limited number of packages Ubuntu officially supports.
If it were possible to use the same USB stick with another operating system, for example to store files to use on Windows, a virus in the other operating system could corrupt your Tails.
This is not possible using the recommended installation methods. Tails is designed to be a live system running from a removable media: USB stick or DVD.
This is a conscious decision as this mode of operation is better for what we want to provide to Tails users: amnesia, the fact that Tails leaves no traces on the computer after a session is closed.
No. Those installation methods are unsupported. They might not work at all, or worse: they might seem to work, but produce a USB stick that does *not* behave like Tails should. Follow the [[download and installation documentation|install]] instead.