DistroWatch reviews Kali Linux 2016.1

Kali Linux is bird of a slightly different feather, in terms of Linux distributions. Kali's focus is on security and forensics, but some Linux novices have been installing it without knowing much about either thing. DistroWatch has a full review of Kali Linux 2016.1 and doesn't think it's really appropriate for beginners.

Jesse Smith reports for DistroWatch:

Kali Linux, which was formally known as BackTrack, is a forensic and security-focused distribution based on Debian's Testing branch. Kali Linux is designed with penetration testing, data recovery and threat detection in mind. The project switched over to a rolling release model earlier this year in an effort to provide more up to date security utilities to the distribution's users. By the time I was finished my trial with Kali Linux I was more puzzled than when I started as to why I keep hearing about new Linux users installing the distribution. Nothing on the project's website suggests it is a good distribution for beginners or, in fact, anyone other than security researches. In fact, the Kali website specifically warns people about its nature. That is not to say Kali isn't a good distribution. The project has a very precise mission: provide a wide variety of security tools in a live (and installable) package. As a live disc a professional can take with them to jobs and use from any computer, Kali does quite well. The catch is we need to already be familiar with the security tools Kali provides. Friendly and discoverable graphical applications are few and far between with Kali and almost everything is done from the command line. …I would like to mention something that using Kali Linux highlighted for me this week. Kali Linux is good at what it does: acting as a platform for up to date security utilities. But in using Kali, it became painfully clear that there is a lack of friendly open source security tools and an even greater lack of good documentation for these tools. Some of the tools Kali ships I had used before and some I had not. And, being exposed to the new tools, I was struck by just how unfriendly their help pages and documentation were for learning what each tool was and how it was to be used. This is not a fault of Kali Linux, but certainly a fault many upstream software projects share. I think we, as developers, need to be reminded that everyone uses our software for the first time once, and they're not likely to use it a second time if we do a poor job of making our software easy to learn. More at DistroWatch

Jesse Smith's review of Kali Linux 2016.1 spawned a thread on the Linux subreddit and folks there weren't shy about sharing their opinions about his review or about beginners that try to run Kali: