Kali is now on windows.

Just a little announcement. I know Kali doesn’t have the best wrap and its essentially just Debian with a bunch of programs pre-installed (with a hectic wallpaper), but if you have ever wondered what it’s like but can’t really be bothered setting up the partitions or running VM, now is the time to strike.

Kali Linux is now downloadable in the windows store and can now be launched like it’s Microsoft word (once set up). I haven’t really played with it yet at a fair bit of it goes over my head but it’s interesting going through all the programs. Could possibly have some utility to someone.

Wait, you can just run it like an “app”? That’s actually really cool. I wonder if it’s just like a wrapped-up VM or if they were able to completely build it on top of WSL or something. Definitely going to have to take a look! As an aside, I would caution anyone interested in running Kali against the “easy choice” of just wiping your native OS and replacing it with Kali. While it is a functional Linux distribution, I’ve found that it behaves much better as a tool than a workspace. That is- learn how to set it up in a VM. They have an awesome guide in their docs.

It’s not an app, it’s a distro installable via WSL (Windows Service for Linux). Plus the kali version in the store is bare bones. You will have to either install all the stuff yourself or use the kali meta packages to get the stuff you want.

BTW, I really recommend checking WSL if you are on Windows, I use Debian that way and it’s a lifesaver.

Its great that we have WSL on windows now however with Kali you may find issues with running updates and installing different packages as the version they ship is old and the public keys have expried so updating and installing can be a real pain! As apt wont do anything !

Based on feedback from Microsoft they should be pushing a newer version of Kali into the store for WSL Q2/Q3 this year which should makes these issues less common :) Thankfully Ubuntu just works

Maybe also worth mentioning that a lot of tools in apt (other than like the really popular ones, I suppose) are out of date. Basically any time you have to think “oh man I didn’t realize I could just apt install that!”, what you should do is hop over to github or the like and see if there’s a newer version. Sometimes it’s benign, or sometimes you end up with different people on the same team using the “same tool” and getting different answers. That would be a nightmare…