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.
Ubuntu adds features in ways that we find dangerous for privacy. For example Ubuntu One ([partly discontinued](http://blog.canonical.com/2014/04/02/shutting-down-ubuntu-one-file-services/))and the [Amazon ads and data leaks](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-amazon-ads-and-data-leaks).
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.