Forum Thread: Distro to Use for Hacking [Discussion]

For newbies here, I suggest Kali Linux as all my tutorials will be using Kali. If we are using multiple OS's, it can be very confusing to the newcomer.

I strongly suggest that any and all posts be made using Kali.

If you don't mind me asking, what is your personally favorite OS for hacking? I understand that Kali should be a convention for posts here but everyone has their personal tastes. Also it would be nice to hear input from a legitimate professional.

-Defalt

I agree, Kali should be convention

Just a side note that most Kali commands work on other Debian-based hacking distros as well (like ParrotSec)

-Phoenix750

That is true, but sometimes the scripts and commands are in different directories. That can be confusing to newcomers.

I use Kali, mainly for convenience. It has lots of tools already installed and plenty of community and support. I used Xiaopan for a while, when I only needed wifi cracking, it was great because back in the days it had more specific wifi tools than backtrack, but now I just use Kali, as it's up to date with everything.

Quite honestly I've tried ParrotSec and a couple of others and although they are not bad but they are lacking one thing Kali has: a community. Every tutorial will be with Kali, OffSec is a big company with lots of support, been around for a long time and they know what their doing.

If ever you have a question about any other OS you might have a hard time finding an answer yet if your using Kali most likely your question has already been answered.

Just my 2 cents.

Cheers,
Washu

That's the problem. When you for example go to Kali, ParrotSec loses users, thus it loses it's community. There is no competition anymore, and that is the problem in my eyes. OffSec owns a little bit too much.

-Phoenix750

Its true that OffSec owns lots of it but since its all open source, competition is not needed for growth.

I think that having 1 distro that the entire community focuses on is actually good since it allows us to have one great OS rather than several OK ones.

Now if all of a sudden OffSec started making its software proprietary that would be a problem but its very unlikely that they will.

Cheers,
Washu

That's not what I ment. The thing is that great OS'es like Parrot or BlackArch don't get noticed because of Kali overpowering all of them due to it's popularity. I could make an entire list of things Parrot has that Kali doesn't.

-Phoenix750

An quite frankly I really liked the extra features that Parrot provided like Pandora's Box, RAM-Only-Surfing, PenMode, etc. yet I would rather have the developer's of ParrotSec help add those features to Kali that way instead of spreading out we can all work together.

Please don't think that I'm hating on ParrotSec; I'm happy that they made such a great OS, I'd just be even happier if they worked together with OffSec to make one really great OS.

Cheers,
Washu