On October 7, we launched our donation campaign by explaining [[why supporting Tails is more important than ever|news/2019-fundraiser]]. On October 31, we summarized [[what we did in 2019 to make Tails easier to adopt by new users|news/achievements_in_2019]]. Today we pass on to you our plans for 2020.
But first, we are pleased that the donation campaign has been pretty successful so far. We received around 50 000 € already, which is 69% more than last year. Still, these good results are due to some large donations and fewer people have been donating so far, 16% less than in 2018. We hope that after reading this post many of you will consider <a href="https://tails.net/donate/?r=plans2020">donating to Tails</a>.
Tails ships an automatic upgrade mechanism since 2013. But this mechanism only works for a limited amount of upgrades, after which a [["manual" upgrade|doc/upgrade#manual]] is needed.
These manual upgrades are a major pain point and we know that users often think their Tails is "broken" when automatic upgrades are not possible anymore.
In 2020, we will remove the need for most of these manual upgrades. And as automatic upgrades are also often too painful we will research ways to make them lighter and more robust.
Leveraging all the work that we have done in the past years to make Tails easier to install and use, in 2020, we will explain better what Tails is and why people should use it.
The text on our Home and About pages have not changed significantly since 2011. It is too verbose, too technical for most people, and not sufficiently engaging visually. Since then Tails has come a long way: the number of people using Tails has been multiplied by 16. Tails is no longer an experimental project for privacy experts but a well-established reference.
For the less technical part of our target audience, Tails is a technological object like nothing they have used before. Some of the core concepts of Tails are particularly innovative and hard to understand before using it:
Currently, many have to learn how to disable Secure Boot on their computer. This process is slightly different on every computer, is very complicated to learn on your own, and can lead to scary problems on Windows computers, for example [[!tails_ticket 15016#note-19 desc="*BitLocker* asking you for a recovery key"]].