this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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I use Kali Linux for cybersecurity work and learning in a VM on my Windows computer. If I ever moved completely over to Linux, what should I do, can I use Kali as my complete desktop?
Kali is a very bad choice as a desktop or daily driver. It’s intended to be used as a toolkit for security work and so it doesn’t prioritize the needs of normal desktop use in either package management, defaults or patch updates.
If you ever switched to Linux, pick a distribution you can live with and run kali in a vm like you’re doing now.
Think of it this way: you wouldn’t move into a shoot house, mechanics garage or escape room, would you?
Do I get new puzzles every week if I lived in a escape room?
Ok, it just seems funny to need to use a Kali VM when I’d already be on Linux, but no big deal I guess.
I used it as an installed desktop environment at a workbench in a non security context for a year. It was a pain in the butt in like a million ways.
Even when I used the tools kali ships with regularly I either dual booted or ran it inside a vm.
If you wanna understand why every time someone asks about using kali as a daily driver even on their own forums, a bunch of people pop up and say it’s a bad idea, give it a shot sometime.
Ha no worry, I believe all you guys now and wouldn’t do it, and would just use a VM. Thank you for the insight.
You can just install the tools you want on your host OS. But if it's like hundreds of tools then yeah makes more sense to run it inside a VM, just so it's all nice and separate from your daily-driver. And you may think it's funny but the performance of Linux-on-Linux is actually pretty good, and there isn't much of a RAM/CPU overhead either. And if you're really strapped for RAM, you could use KSM (kernel samepage merging) and ballooning.
Many Linux users use VMs (or containers) for separate workloads, and it's a completely normal thing to do. For instance, on my homelab box, my host OS is my daily-driver, but all my lab stuff (Kubernetes, Ansible etc) all run under VMs. The performance is so good that you won't even notice/care that it's running on a VM. This is all thanks to the Linux/KVM/QEMU/libvirt stack, if it were something else like VMWare or VBox, it'd be a lot more clunkier and you can feel that it's running on a VM - but that's not the case with KVM.
Awesome good to know, thank you for the info!
No never! Do not use Kali as main OS choose Debian, Fedora, RHEL (not designed for this use case) or Arch system
Guess you mean replicate your existing install from the VM.
dpkg -lto a text file and work with that, or use something like apt-clone https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=apt-cloneFrom there, install Kali Linux, and restore the relevant parts.
Oh very cool thank you. In one way I meant more simply just if Kali is decent as a daily driver complete desktop, rather than just as a specialized toolkit.
Kali Linux is based on Debian, so I guess you'll be fine.
Kali Linux is a pretty specific tool, it's not suited for use as a daily driver desktop OS.
It is my understanding that Kali is based on Debian with an xfce desktop, so if you want a similar experience (same GUI, same package manager) in a daily driver OS, you can start there.
Short answer: no
Long aswer: Kali, as a desktop is just half broken debian with a theme and a bunch of bloatware preinstalled... Even if your host is linux, you should still run Kali in a VM.
Short answer: yes
Longer answer: Kali is not intended to be a normal desktop OS. It will work, but ut might be a bit limiting.
If you want a desktop linux with a lot of the security stuff with it, you might want to check out ParrotSec. I used that on my work laptop for a few years.