Best Distro for Pentesting/Vuln Scanning?

I recently secured an entry level job with a cybersecurity company as a vulnerability scanner, with the expectation of entering into pentesting within the next few years. I am now looking to set up one of my laptops with a work environment and didn't know which linux distro to go with. Of course Kali has been shilled to death by cybersec normal people but I am far more familiar with arch. I've heard of black arch but it seems poorly maintained and honestly kinda gay. Should I just go with base arch and install the specific packages I need or is kali the way? What do you lainons recommend?

>>89119 I've used kali in all my cyber university courses. Curious what other people say, but kali is the swiss army knife. https://www.kali.org/tools/

>>89119 I don't understand what the advantage of a "pentesting distro" is besides coming with a bunch of tools. Can't you turn Debian into Kali by just installing equivalent packages? I also don't like Kali because it has some really weird compositing built into the desktop, which is silly. What if I am running it on a thumb drive and have plugged it into some ancient piece of crap? I'd like to be able to use the terminal without it lagging.

>>89124 >I don't understand what the advantage of a "pentesting distro" is besides coming with a bunch of tools. That's the only advantage, pretty much every GNU/Linux distro is just a copy of another distro, mainly Arch, Fedora and Debian with a few tools and accessibility features. You could technically use Debian with Kali repos but it's just much easier to install Kali from the get-go. Debian also does not recommend to get repos from other sources. >What if I am running it on a thumb drive and have plugged it into some ancient piece They have (or had, I can't find it at this moment) that work/s/ed without an X session.

>>89119 just use kali like a normal person.

>>89124 two advantages: it just werks, and it's separate from your main system. having a package conflict with some random part of your main os is the most annoying thing that can happen. although i do agree that most of your time will be spent in either ida, gdb or burp suite, and many packages are useless or old, we have the storage space and the time saved whenever you need a random thingamabob is worth the investment.

Black arch - arch based with pentesting tools https://www.blackarch.org/

>>89124 The difference between pentesting distros and their normal counterparts is not the tools already pre-installed but the fact that you have a bunch of other tools in the repos, made easily available without any hassle like compiling them or stuff breaking. The tools that come pre-installed can of course be installed on any normal distro, but the experience of installing additional stuff that goes beyond the scope of normal distros (as it's far too specialized) is what makes the those pentesting distros useful. You can install those repos on Arch/Debian and make it yourself, but there isn't a lot of difference between Debian or Kali so you could just install Kali to not have any additional hassle or breakages. As for what OP should use, Kali is probably the most usable.

searched for arch-derived distributions with an interest in forensics and security that were maintained on distrowatch.org, and only one result came up: AthenaOS, which might interest you. https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=athena otherwise i would just install the pentesting packages you like on an arch linux box. you can look at the package list for kali to round things out. >>89124 you can instead make a liveiso with your favorite tools. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archiso seems like a good package for doing so.

symantec here we actually happen to be avid readers of lainchan don't worry, josh. just use windows and some cygwinslop whenever you need that one off linux-first software like aircrack-ng see you on monday

>>89169 >symantec Include me in the screenshot. I am the hacker known as lainchan.

Just you arch and install the need tools.

I dunno, I've used gentoo everywhere since 2007.