Tails stands for "The Amnesic Incognito Live System," and the operating system certainly lives up to that name. But what is Tails? Tails is a live operating system, which means it's not installed.

PCWorld’s guide helps users navigate the overwhelming choice of approximately 250 Linux distributions by focusing on five main strains: Debian, Red Hat/Fedora, Arch, Slackware, and Gentoo.

Linux (come on, you knew it’d be Linux) takes a different approach: no locks, no guardrails, no limits. That’s what makes Linux a real operating system, something its competitors, dwarfing it in ...