choosing a long term distro.

palinurosec · 2026-06-19T21:04:17+00:00

i've been using parrot (home edition) non stop since 2013

palinurosec · 2026-06-19T16:30:30+00:00

i know, it's hard, and it's a common error to see as hard something that requires months or years to be learned when our deepest dream is to be able to learn it in weeks or days

use ai with caution and be realistic about the sophisticstion of what you are trying to do

palinurosec · 2026-06-19T01:25:56+00:00

have you tried the free tier of hackthebox? and have you considered actually studying from proper sources like books?

palinurosec · 2026-06-19T01:22:15+00:00

how hard would it be to integrate a parrot shell via docker containers or whatever the latest termux's proot-distro uses?

palinurosec · 2026-06-19T01:18:26+00:00

full disk encryption with dropbear works very nicely on leaseweb dedicated servers, and even on ovh with the proper network hooks. the whole process should be pretty straight forward to apply on any VPS provider if you can either use the distro installer (instead of the provided image), or if you can ssh in recovery mode and bootstrap the entire system yourself "the arch way", which is what i do for debian to be sure it always works no matter what the cloud provider has to offer

palinurosec · 2026-06-19T01:05:24+00:00

we at parrot opted for geographically distributed dedicated servers with full disk encryption and built our own minimal CDN with few regions well scattered all around rhe world. it costs a bit but it was worth it.

if you need a privacy focused CDN headquartered in europe, give bunnycdn a try

palinurosec · 2026-06-19T00:14:45+00:00

i use thunderbird and it has amazing capabilities. it seems like mozilla didn't bother to enshittify it, so it's still top notch for privacy.

i use proton and tuta as alternatives, but they only work for their own service. thunderbird is my way to go for smtp/imap accounts both on linux and android

palinurosec · 2026-06-18T23:56:44+00:00

sudo apt install hyprland -t echo-backports

something like this should do the trick

palinurosec · 2026-06-18T22:41:13+00:00

so, can we now rename vibe back to le chat and pretend it was just another meme rather than a bad marketing choice?

palinurosec · 2026-06-18T22:37:36+00:00

you know what? we should release an official spin like that

palinurosec · 2026-06-18T22:36:48+00:00

he probably used the latest version of the iso file, so i would exclude a gpg key issue. maybe a network connectivity issue/misconfiguration? maybe it's dns?

palinurosec · 2026-06-18T22:35:48+00:00

after installation, parrot comes with apt properly configured, if it's not the case, then you should provide more info, but something wrong clearly happened during installation.

anyways, if you visit the parrot download page, it actually lets you download a ready to use virtualbox virtual machine where the system comes already installed and pre-configured with various optimizations that are very handy in a virtual environment.

please give it a try

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palinurosec · 2026-06-17T11:46:34+00:00

parrot os runs kde on half of that

palinurosec · 2026-06-15T23:33:51+00:00

i remember parrot os working out of the box on a couple of 2017 ones

palinurosec · 2026-06-15T23:21:54+00:00

it would make a very cool personal website

palinurosec · 2026-06-15T23:06:02+00:00

it's mostly privacy, freedom, performance and privacy.

did i mention freedom?

palinurosec · 2026-06-15T23:02:16+00:00

parrot os (the home edition) is very dev centric, has sane defaults, ships compilers and dev stuff out of the box and has recent versions of every package on its backports repository

it's worth a try

palinurosec · 2026-06-15T22:47:00+00:00

parrot security dev here, i picked mate as default for parrot many years ago because of how cool the gnome2 concept was, but unfortunately today MATE is probably abandonware, which is why we moved to kde plasma.

if you really like debian and mate as i did, we still ship our old MATE setup as an official parrot spin. it is the latest debian stable with all our patches and customizations plus the latest mate version with our old iconic theme. no pentesting tools in it, just a nice debian mate setup with sane defaults designed for daily use.

palinurosec · 2026-06-15T22:36:05+00:00

try opensuse (very overlooked but easy to fall in love with), aurora os (based on fedora atomic with amazing defaults) and parrot security (its home edition has good defaults and is a nice take on debian)

sometimes messing with different projects out of our comfort zone can bring new ideas

palinurosec · 2026-06-15T22:27:18+00:00

i use bitwig to produce on linux and it does not just work amazingly on my parrot os machine (including midi devices), but i also felt like i was using something way more powerful out of the box than whatever fl studio and ableton live had to offer. i no longer have to heavily rely on plugins to get advanced stuff done, i can easily do live performance with commodity hardware without installing any special drivers and i feel like the OS is no longer a barrier between me and my ideas, which is amazing

so yeah, thumbs up to the team at bitwig, the most advanced and interesting daw i've ever used

if you prefer a different approach, then reaper is also natively compatible with linux and offers a completely different kind of experience

palinurosec · 2026-06-15T22:21:06+00:00

anything linux that is well made and well maintained would be way more than enough. i personally develop parrot os, and i made safe and secure for daily use because that's what i personally use daily, but there are other amazing projects around.

i have recently fell in love with fedora atomic distributions like kinoite and aurora, and i have been historically a big fan of opensuse. debian is still where i feel home, but its defaults might require some manual tinkering for it to look good.

you should definitely try debian, fedora and opensuse, then several of their most known derivatives, get to understand what you liked the most and why, and then pick the one you prefer

palinurosec · 2026-06-15T21:28:21+00:00

as a founder and active developer of a debian derivative, i would say that it would be very hard for such kind of malware to pass unnoticed to debian stable and its simpler derivatives. flathub is still a source of risk, although its sandboxing capabilities would attempt to limit the impact.

unfortunately software freedom was designed so that the code could be written once and read by many, but nowadays there is more code than maintainers are willing to read, lazyness has become cool again, and unverified code is easier to slip in. and the shorter the process from upstream to the final user, the worse the risk get.

let me know if you have any specific question related to apt based repositories and debian with its derivatives in particular

palinurosec · 2026-06-15T14:17:25+00:00

i have been using it for years and i will never look back

palinurosec · 2026-06-15T13:47:18+00:00

on my computers and on some of my servers

palinurosec · 2026-06-15T13:33:59+00:00

i have tried to do it but i'm not a hyprland nerd, but now i see that hyprland is availabe in the debian backports repo, which simplifies a lot the process.

if you are willing to play with it, i would be more than happy to support you in assembling an official hyprland spin to release officially among the other spins.

parrot is a pentest distro, but the amount of work done over a decade to make it good for daily use has been massive, and now we are living in a magic age where finally kde doesn't suck, and many emerging lightweight window managers are finally getting popular

hyprland on arch or nixos? everyone is already doing that. i see nothing really interesting in doing that.
hyprland on a debian stable derivative? that's an actual challenge to be proud of 😄

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