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Comment by Timpy | Hacker News Reader

I always thought Kali wasn't really for daily use. Not a vehicle for every day driving around town, more like a secondary vehicle you only use for work. HiDPI, tool icons, and gnome themes make it seem otherwise. Sure, these things are nice whether you're using it for work or play, but I wonder. Is anybody running kali as their daily driver?

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You definitely shouldn't use it as a daily. However, Offensive Security is trying to make it a smooth experience given that quite a bit of time is spent using it for penetration tests, CTFs, etc in addition to "competition" from ParrotOS. Most folks that I know would switch to it anyway so having it be the default makes it easier.

Can you elaborate why someone shouldn't use it as a daily driver?

I have used Linux for a decade now and I just got a friend interested in it and his pick was Kali because he was interested in learning about security stuff.

I took a quick look at it and saw that it was debian based and XFCE is my favourite desktop environment so I figured he'd be alright with it.

It used to be that Kali would start a ton of services at boot and open those ports up to the LAN interface. Stuff like Postgresql that you probably don't want to expose any wider than localhost.

It also defaulted to running as a root user for everything, but they recently changed that.

Hmm I don't remember that ever being true. Items like Postgress would listen on localhost only. No services outside of DHCP were even enabled by default going all the way back to BackTrack.

This is not recommended. It's a specific tool for a specific purpose. I seem to recall a while back that it even had some default security options disabled on the system to allow for all the crazy stuff it does. It's not meant to be a replacement for a Linux Mint or Ubuntu desktop system.

Run it on a second laptop, on a USB stick, or in a virtual machine (that you cede access to the networking hardware).

The stackexchange sites get questions like "hey, I am using Kali because all the cool hackers use it, but my Wifi hardware doesn't work, and I cannot install my favorite browsers, what should I do?" from absolute newbies about every week or so.

Update for being one of the few non-zsh questions.

IMO there are the young script kiddie types that have it on their main laptop to be cool, but yeah I don't see people using it except for work purposes.

I'd consider these accessibility features and as such I'd say they're important for any GUI work tool, even if it's not your daily driver.

I can’t find the article and relevant study right now, but people actually perform better when they are using aesthetically pleasing gear. That would include software.

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