The unique selling points
What makes them stand out?
Although the distributions strive to ensure your online privacy, there’s plenty to distinguish them from one another. Linux Kodachi is developed by a professional IT security service provider. The project went into a period of hibernation until 2016, but now ships new releases and updates at regular intervals. With its out-of-the-box software offerings, the distribution towers above the competition. Unlike the others, it recommends running it in a virtual machine.
Septor Linux is still quite new, having debuted in 2018. It produced a single release in 2019, but has already had four releases so far in 2020. Each new release ships updates from the Debian Buster repository, along with updates for various applications.
TENS, which was previously known as Lightweight Portable Security, is updated regularly, typically with quarterly maintenance releases. It’s designed, developed and distributed by the United States Department of Defense’s Air Force Research Laboratory.
The best feature of Whonix is the amount of documentation on offer, which you can use to fine-tune the distribution and bundled applications and utilities. But it’s ill-suited for machines with limited resources because it requires simultaneously running two virtual machines. This will be a tall task for a dual-core machine with only 4GB RAM. Finally, there’s Tails, which is one of the best-maintained security distros. Its fast pace of development sometimes results in two new releases in a month.