# TLDR We would like to use TBB as "system Tor". # Long ## Why? * Most, latest technology for censorship circumvention, i.e. pluggable transports such as meek, scamblesuite, fte, etc. will not be packaged for Debian anytime soon. * Pluggable transports are due to their nature too dynamically evolving. There is a giant gap between availability of a pluggable transports and installability from stable distributions such as Debian. * Vidalia has been deprecated. There is no nicely looking, maintained way to easily configure Tor and bridges anymore besides the tor-launcher add-on. * TBB comes with the tor-launcher add-on, which is a well maintained GUI for configuration and troubleshooting of Tor and all sorts of the latest and greatest pluggable transports. * TBB comes with recent versions of Tor. * TBB is built reproducibly. ## Current Problem At the moment, TBB is an integrated browser package. It does not integrate well for use with other applications, with the general system. Because, * once you close the browser window, no other application can connect. * it's not possible to just configure and start Tor without opening the browser window * once Tor is configured, you cannot start Tor without running X server ## Related It's still an open task how to "Make TIMB and TBB/PTTBB cooperate in a smarter way.": https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10950 Maybe we can think of something to solve both at once. ## Solution This is one solution that might work. Not necessarily the ultimate one. A rough plan. A combination of new start scripts + environment variables obeyed by tor-launcher. * keep ~/tor-browser_en-US/start-tor-browser as is * add other launcher scripts to the Browser (or so) sub directory to keep your main directory simple * add ~/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/start-tor-only * add ~/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/stop-tor-only * add ~/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/configure-and-start-tor * add ~/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/configure-tor-only (if that is possible) * add ~/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/start-browser-only (connect to previously started Tor) That should suffice making TBB usable as "system Tor". What do you think? # Feedback What do you think about this proposal in general? Linostar and I have some other solutions involving xul launcher in mind. Maybe you have some other possible solution in mind? Depending on how much, complex, difficult this task is, linostar might provide a patch to add this feature.