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this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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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!