Kali Linux vs CentOS
When comparing Kali Linux vs CentOS, the Slant community recommends Kali Linux for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux distributions for desktops?” Kali Linux is ranked 30th while CentOS is ranked 48th. The most important reason people chose Kali Linux is:
Contains too many tools for hacking. Those tools are not already included in BackBox or ParrotOS.
Specs
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 Greatly favours stability over anything else
CentOS favours stability over being up-to date. For this reason it ships with packages that may be up to two years behind in order to ensure stability over everything else.
Using older versions for packages means that they have been thoroughly tested and used in production for quite some time, and are ensured to play well with each-other.
This strategy has paid off quite a lot in the past. One example is the Heartbleed bug which left CentOS unaffected since it was using a two-year old OpenSSL library which did not have the bug.
Pro Applications don't have to take into account potentially breaking changes in libraries
Since CentOS backports all updates and bug fixes to older versions in order to maintain package compatibility across releases, applications hosted on Red Hat Linux don't have to worry about potential breaking changes in libraries they use, especially language libraries.
Pro Good long term support
Pro Built-in disaster recovery solutions through clusters
CentOS has several built-in solutions for disaster recovery. For example, it comes with pacemaker which can be configured to manage multi-site and and stretch clusters across multiple geographical locations for disaster recovery and scalability. It can also be configured to trigger notifications when the status of a managed cluster changes by using enhanced pacemaker alerts.
Pro Supports multiple PHP versions
You can install multiple PHP versions and have them available for different users.
Pro Built-in support for containers
Comes with built-in management tools for containers (Atomic CLI, Cockpit) and a container runtime in the form of Docker engine.
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.