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CentOS

Stacks11.9K

Followers7.6K

+ 1

Votes47

Kali Linux

Stacks192

Followers295

+ 1

Votes20

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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.

Decisions about CentOS and Kali Linux

Jerome/Zen Quah

Software Engineer · Aug 2, 2020 | 8 upvotes · 191.3K views

Chose

Ubuntu

over

CentOS

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)

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Pros of CentOS

Pros of Kali Linux

15
Stable
8
Free to use
8
Reliable
5
Has epel packages
5
Good support
4
Great Community
2
I've moved from gentoo to centos

7
Penetration testing tools are pre-installed
7
Has many penetration testing tools
4
Runs on both x86 and ARM platforms
2
Its just debian so it has better support

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Cons of CentOS

Cons of Kali Linux

1
Yum is a horrible package manager

2
Outdated versions of common packages
2
Root GUI setup is a potential security hole
2
Packages are too large in size as compare to alpine
1
Wireless driver issues on some systems

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What companies use CentOS?

What companies use Kali Linux?

See which teams inside your own company are using CentOS or Kali Linux.

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What tools integrate with CentOS?

What tools integrate with Kali Linux?

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What are some alternatives to CentOS and Kali Linux?

Ubuntu

Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It also means ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers.

Fedora

Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that provides users with access to the latest free and open source software, in a stable, secure and easy to manage form. Fedora is the largest of many free software creations of the Fedora Project. Because of its predominance, the word "Fedora" is often used interchangeably to mean both the Fedora Project and the Fedora operating system.

Debian

Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel or the FreeBSD kernel. Linux is a piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide. FreeBSD is an operating system including a kernel and other software.

Amazon Linux

The Amazon Linux AMI is a supported and maintained Linux image provided by Amazon Web Services for use on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

openSUSE

The openSUSE project is a worldwide effort that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. openSUSE creates one of the world's best Linux distributions, working together in an open, transparent and friendly manner as part of the worldwide Free and Open Source Software community.

See all alternatives

CentOS vs Kali Linux