After several hours of evaluation of several “first Linux” possibilities with the community, Kali Linux has won as the easiest and most powerful option to start with and will therefore be what we use in the 2022 Beginner Boost, yes even for non-security related careers.
VirtualBox provides the best options and flexibility for beginners.
Although we did 2021 with Docker Desktop (which is not proprietary)
using containers for “first Linux” lacks a certain essential appeal to
absolute beginners. It’s certainly effective at learning the command
line, but it is incomplete, lacks man pages and persistence, and does
not provide an intuitive feel for just exactly what a virtual machine
actually is. Kali has a very light-weight importable ova file. Just
import it and run it. No installation required.
Kali Linux is developed with training specifically in mind. This
means that it has all the stuff a beginner needs to understand Linux and
how to interrogate and understand systems for the sake of hacking them.
These tools are absolutely essential when learning about any systems
administration and operations (ex: nmap).
Kali Linux is pretty. It almost feels like playing a game running
it. It’s absolutely beautiful these days. It even colorizes the output
of things like ip a. Having aesthetic appeal goes a very long way
toward getting a person to want to spend time in it and learn it.
Dopamine is scientifically proven to promote learning and retention.
Kali Linux enables both security operations and cloud-native engineering careers. The tools used for hacking are also the essential tools for professional problem determination for any system administrator.
Kali Linux has a full, free training course and available certifications. For those who crave the structure of a course (instead of just messing around) Kali has https://kali.training that is completely free and community driven and supported. In fact, Kali Linux is the only desktop Linux distro with its own certification (if you choose). In fact, there is a certification in basic Kali Linux usage but the flagship OSCP certification training course is actually named “Pentesting with Kali Linux.”
Kali Linux was created and is maintained by Offensive Security the most professionally respected pentesting training organization in the world. The OSCP exam is a sound investment for any would-be professional pentester and Kali gets you closer to that than any other distribution. Even though real hackers will build their own distros with the tools they prefer and use (probably from vanilla Arch) having Kali with all the tools for absolute “script kiddy” beginners is absolutely fine. It’s a fun, great start.
Kali Linux gets frequent, regular updates unlike Linux Mint, PopOS or any other other popular desktop distributions. New tools and tweaks are constantly coming out for Kali since it is the primary tool for keeping up with modern security vulnerabilities. Those who support Kali are also financially incentivised to keep it on the cutting edge without making it unstable. This frequent upgrade requirement is likely the reason Kali remains so light-weight and easily importable into VirtualBox. You can get on any computer in the world, install VirtualBox and then Kali in minutes and be hacking. Hackers can do this relatively quickly and erase their footprints rather easily using this approach.
Kali Linux has the best USB boot options because people frequently run Windows on their computers and only boot into Kali when they know they are going to be hacking. This is far easier than a dual boot (and safer, in many respects) but still allows the full power of the hardware for either gaming, ML, or hacking.
Related:
20220125192913 Linux on VirtualBox, Best First Linux Experience
#linux #kali #firstlinux #edtech #vms #distros #offsec #devops