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CentOS vs Kali Linux: What are the differences?
Developers describe CentOS as "The Community ENTerprise Operating System". The CentOS Project is a community-driven free software effort focused on delivering a robust open source ecosystem. For users, we offer a consistent manageable platform that suits a wide variety of deployments. For open source communities, we offer a solid, predictable base to build upon, along with extensive resources to build, test, release, and maintain their code. On the other hand, Kali Linux is detailed as "Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking Linux Distribution". It is a Debian-based Linux distribution aimed at advanced Penetration Testing and Security Auditing. It contains several hundred tools which are geared towards various information security tasks, such as Penetration Testing, Security research, Computer Forensics and Reverse Engineering.
CentOS and Kali Linux can be primarily classified as "Operating Systems" tools.
Global familiarity, free, widely used, and as a debian distro feels more comfortable when rapidly switching between local macOS and remote command lines.
CentOS does boast quite a few security/stability improvements, however as a RHEL-based distro, differs quite significantly in the command line and suffers from slightly less frequent package updates. (Could be a good or bad thing depending on your use-case and if it is public facing)
Pros of CentOS
- Stable15
- Free to use8
- Reliable8
- Has epel packages5
- Good support5
- Great Community4
- I've moved from gentoo to centos2
Pros of Kali Linux
- Penetration testing tools are pre-installed7
- Has many penetration testing tools7
- Runs on both x86 and ARM platforms4
- Its just debian so it has better support2
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Cons of CentOS
- Yum is a horrible package manager1
Cons of Kali Linux
- Outdated versions of common packages2
- Root GUI setup is a potential security hole2
- Packages are too large in size as compare to alpine2
- Wireless driver issues on some systems1