Kali as a Regular Operating System

Jun 25, 2019 · 2 mins read

If you are an aspiring pentester you should definitely use Kali Linux and make it your primary OS. Switching to a new OS can be a very hard decision to make. Concerns such as whether you can do your regular work may rise. It has been quite a while (3 years) since I am using Kali as my primary OS and here are my experiences with it.

If you are shifting from a Windows environment and have no prior experience with Linux operating systems it’s best not to move to Kali just yet. Try some other beginner-friendly Linux distributions like Ubuntu or Mint before using Kali.

If you are moving from Ubuntu or any other Linux environments (more specifically, from Debian derivates) you will find almost no differences between them. Kali is a Debian derivative. You can do absolutely anything on Kali that you can do on Ubuntu.

Kali was never a barrier for my regular work as a programmer. I have had several IDE’s installed on it- Eclipse, PyCharm, IntelliJ, CodeBlocks, Android studio, and never had any issues during installation or after installing it. Any programming languages compile and run just fine. Both pre-compiled binaries and compiled on machine binaries work without issues. I can do image editing with GIMP and Inkscape. I also use Virtualbox to run other operating systems virtually and everything works without issues.

Since Kali is a rolling distro (frequents updates delivered) you always get to play with the latest software. However, there is also a downside to it. Sometimes frequent updates can break working software. Once my entire OS crashed and I had to reinstall it again (but it was just once). So I recommend not updating very frequently.

There are some other minor issues with Kali. It is not as stable or performant as Ubuntu. I had to deal with some minor bugs regarding UI and the desktop environment. Other than these I had no problems.

Overall, I have a pretty good user experience with Kali Linux as my main OS. If you are aiming to be a pentester but in doubt, whether you should switch OS or not, I would definitely recommend you to make the move.