Next, you need to decide which desktop environment you’d like to use. The Security edition comes with all the penetration testing tools, nicely organized and accessible in the applications menu. The first decision you’ll have to make is whether you want “Parrot Home” or “Parrot Security.” The Home edition doesn’t have any of the hacking tools installed out of the box, but you’ll still get all the privacy features. Parrot has a few different editions you can download. You don’t need to be a cybersecurity professional or penetration tester to use this distribution, though it can definitely fill those purposes well. This can make it very attractive as a daily driver for some users. It’s nice having a distro that works so hard to protect your privacy. You’ll find the Tor browser already installed, and various Firefox privacy plugins like uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, and HTTPS Everywhere. Parrot’s passion for privacy becomes immediately apparent when browsing through the default applications that are included with the distro. These extra security measures are nice, but may be frustrating for a novice that wants their system to “just work.” It also disables auto mounting by default. This creates a smaller RAM footprint but also helps keep the system hidden if you’re on a target network.

Parrot makes a point of “staying quiet” by disabling network services by default. Parrot also maintains their own repos full of penetration testing and privacy tools. Parrot inherits a lot of Debian’s traits, like using the APT package manager, from which it can install a staggering number of packages that are available in Debian’s repos. First impressions of Parrot make it clear that it’s more of a privacy-focused distro than a hacking one. While there’s definitely some functional overlap, the two distributions have a lot of differences. When people think of penetration testing distributions, usually Kali Linux is the first one that comes to mind. For other most popular Linux distributions, please visit our dedicated Linux download page. Parrot OS is a Linux distribution with a heavy focus on user privacy and penetration testing.

Parrot security os 3.0