Kali Linux vs mintty
When comparing Kali Linux vs mintty, the Slant community recommends mintty for most people. In the question“What are the best terminal emulators for Windows?” mintty is ranked 9th while Kali Linux is ranked 37th. The most important reason people chose mintty is:
Mintty is a native Windows wrapper around Cygwin but with added customization features like changing background color, font, transparency, etc.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Better than ParrotOS, BackBox for hacking purpose
Contains too many tools for hacking. Those tools are not already included in BackBox or ParrotOS.
Pro Standard pentest tool set
Pro Live session distro used for forensics
Pro Support for Cygwin and MSYS
Mintty is a native Windows wrapper around Cygwin but with added customization features like changing background color, font, transparency, etc.
Pro Proper support for scrolling in terminal applications
The mouse wheel in mintty actually scrolls the content in man/less/vim, etc.
Pro Xterm-compatible terminal emulation
Xterm is the standard terminal emulator for the X Window System.
Pro UTF-8 support
UTF-8 allows for the encoding of all possible characters.
Pro Drag and drop makes for ease of use
The drag and drop function in mintty allows the user to move an item quickly and easily.
Cons
Con Not intended to be a daily driver
This distro was written for pen testing and security work. It is not meant to be a day-to-day OS (unless that's your job).
Con Very old packages
E.G. Firefox's current version is 61 but Kali linux consists of its 52th version. Though kernel is not that old.
Con No multiple tab support
Con Win32 console API performs poorly
Classic Windows console applications don't work well.
Con No native support for WSL
Cygwin is dead. WSL is amazing, yet Mintty is designed around Cygwin and the WSLtty app to connect Mintty to WSL feels like a hack.