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.