Deployment flexibility
Interaction with physical disks.
Persistence storage and privacy don’t blend well together. While all distros in this Roundup take special care not to interact with the hard disks on the computer, some do let you anchor them if you decide that the benefits of persistence outweigh the downsides. The only exception is TENS which simply cannot be installed. There’s also no installation mechanism for Whonix. The project offers several deployments mechanisms, the most convenient of which is to grab the virtual machines which function like any other installed distro. Linux Kodachi includes an installation script to help anchor the distro to the hard disk like any regular Linux distro. However the installer is very rudimentary and uses GParted for slicing the disk. You also can’t change the default username else many of the custom scripts won’t function post-installation.
Tails takes special care to not use the computer’s hard disks, even if there is some swap space on them. But it does include an installer to create a persistent partition either on the same USB stick that you boot from, or another USB storage device. The installer enables you to choose the type of data you’d like to preserve with options such as SSH keys, Pidgin settings, Icedove configuration and emails, APT packages and more. You also get the option to create a folder to store any personal documents. Even if you’ve created a persistent volume, Tails gives you the option to boot into a pristine environment if you don’t need access to your personal data.