If you are into the Cyber Security field and are doing penetration testing. Then you would have heard about different Linux Distros that are used for this like Kali Linux, BackTrack, Black Arch, Parrot OS etc.

The distro that is talked about the most is Kali Linux as it is the oldest and contain a lot of tools related to penetration testing and also because it is created by the Offensive Security team. Kali Linux has gone through many iterations of updates in order to solve the issue that is there and improve the user experience.

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What is Kali Linux?

It is a penetration testing Linux Distribution which is based on Debian and contains more than 600 tools for auditing and doing security testing of your internal networks, web application, and Reverse Engineering.

It is developed by Offensive Security, a leading Information Security training company. Kali Linux was developed as a refined version of BackTrack that was also developed by Offensive Security and was a replacement OS.

What is Parrot OS?

Parrot Linux (Parrot Security, parrot OS, Parrot GNU/Linux) is a free and open source GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian Testing designed for security experts, developers, and privacy aware people.

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It includes a full portable arsenal for IT security and digital forensics operations, but it also includes everything you need to develop your own programs or protect your privacy while surfing the net.

The operating system ships with the MATE desktop environment preinstalled and is available in several flavors to fit your needs.

Features

Secure — It is always updated, frequently released and fully sandboxed! Everything is under our complete control.

Free — It is free and open-source, we can view the source code and customize it as per our requirements.

Lightweight — This Operating system has proven to be extremely lightweight and run surprisingly fast even on very old hardware or with very limited resources.

Also Read: Understanding Linux File System

Why I Switched to Parrot OS?

This comparison is gonna be subjective to what I have experienced during the time I have used both Kali Linux and Parrot OS.

I have used both of the OS in the Virtual environment and after last release of Kali Linux I started to face some crashes and random network loss on my Kali Linux machine overall I was not able to work the gnome environment that Kali Linux comes with is a bit resource hungry and that might also affect the performance of your OS inside a virtual machine.

And if you look at the hardware requirements you can run Parrot OS on low powered hardware then Kali Linux.

ParrotOS vs Kali Linux: Hardware Requirements

Parrot OS

No Graphical Acceleration Required. Minimum 320mb RAM is required. Minimum 1GHZ dual-core CPU is required. It can boot in legacy and UEFI modes as well. At least16GB of hard disk space is required to install the operating system.

Kali Linux

Graphical Acceleration Required. Minimum 1GB RAM is required. Minimum 1GHZ dual-core CPU is required. It can boot in legacy and UEFI modes as well. At least 20GB of hard disk space is required to install the operating system.

Hardware requirement can be ignored as most modern computers and laptops are powerful enough to run these.

Look and Feel:

When it comes to look and feel of the desktop environment I would definitely prefer Parrot OS as it has very minimalistic and retro Ubuntu Mate environment look which is a very clean and refined look.

on the other hand, if we look at Kali Linux the Gnome environment it provides the more or less same functionality but it does crashes if your system doesn’t have a graphics acceleration and it also doesn’t look so clean and refined look according to me.

If you talk about tools it does have all the tools that are present in Kali Linux and also have some extra tools that are used for development and for privacy concerns like AnonSurf to protect your online identity and Wifiphisher for penetration testing.

ParrotOS vs Kali Linux: Performance

When we talk about performance, Kali is a bit laggy and when you run it on a low-end system, sometimes it’s a nightmare when you have some memory intensive tasking running in the background and you doing something else. But Parrot it is very lightweight and doesn’t lag much. because it runs on low specification systems as well.

Conclusion

I hope you got a clear idea about the Parrot security OS and Kali Linux. I discussed pretty much everything about both the operating systems in a detailed manner. But selecting an operating system is based on your taste and choice, if you have a low specification system I would highly recommend to go with Parrot Sec OS. other than that go with whatever you want.

Most of the people argue that Parrot has more tools than Kali Linux and in Parrot Os, we can set up Anonymous Surf easily. but what I believe and say is Penetration testing is not about Setting up the tools it’s all about identifying the defects in a system.

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