I started with Backtrack on a laptop, and I currently have Kali on a preserved USB; with endeavor as a daily driver.

That being said, my current “real” daily drivers in Win10, mostly for gaming - Not because proton doesn’t do a hell of a job, it certainly does, but it makes modding single player games more complicated. I will say that is absolutely my fault, I haven’t spent enough time to figure it out. But after work, and the wife, and the animals, and the alcoholic BIL who shares the house… I just want to use Vortex to add some simple QOL mods to single player games and play it.

I troubleshoot IT issues all day at work, at the end of the day, I just need it to work. I’ve hardened and removed as much telemetry type bullshit as I could, but I’m sure some slips out. For my threat model, on this machine, I’m fine with it.

On the aforementioned labtop I boot into Kali for… well, that has a different threat model.

Its all self hosted vulnerable VMs for the specific reason of education, but some activities may fall into a grey area, so better safe than sorry.

Kali was built out as a penetration testing distro, though it does contain some diagnostic tools.

Not a bad place to start if you’re used to Debian, but it is a rolling release so it may break unexpectedly, or have new bugs introduced with each update.

A persistent USB with just Debian could have all the same tools installed but have a longer support scope on releases so you don’t have to update daily (bleeding edge) which is nice to reduce read/writes to the flash drive it’s on.

That being said, I keep a Kali live image (persistent) but thats becauae its home - my first introduction to Linux was 5 minutes with Red Hat, but aside from a brief intro in highschool, I really started with Linux in Backtrack, offensive security’s predecessor to Kali.

Yes, I have to learn things the hard way lol.

I’d be happy to take one, should you still have any to give out.

Maybe they mean they will dual boot between windows and a hypervisor? I’ve never considered if that’s a possibility.

I keep seeing Pop recommended so hijacking for an issue I ran into switching away from it - I had to completely wipe the drive prior to formatting the drive for whatever Debian based distro I was checking out.

Long story short, it was due to the bootloader for Pop remaining and interfering with the install process. So a full wipe wouldn’t be necessary most likely, just clearing your boot partition should be enough.

If an attacker has physical access then you’re already screwed in most cases.

I run a server on unraid.

Honestly, it works as a way to cut your teeth with a type 1 hypervisor.

Fairly user friendly, and the community seems to offer a lot of support.

That being said, I mainly use it as a file server and a place to host containerized stuff that doesn’t need to bog down a gaming rig.

I got the hardware for free, so other than upgading the CPU to 10 cores (used, 50 dollars, not bad) and paying for electricity, it just churns along doing its thing.

Lol I remember that from highschool on the first Linux system I got my hands on.

Thanks for some of the only good memories from that time in my life.