Recommended Linux Distro for Penetration Testing and Programming

[piemadd]

Hey all! As my first semester of School is coming to an end, I have realized that I no longer need the Windows-Only utilities which are on my computer, and I can finally move back to linux. I have used Backbox before, but I was also looking at ParrotOS. Note: I will not be accepting Kali Linux as an answer as it is hot doodoo and I am not even touching that even with a 100 foot pole. Anyways, any recommendations?

[WkdPaul]

No idea about this side of things. One forum I like to crawl is Hak5, though this might be a bit too "basic" for them, it's possible they would be happy to help ;

https://forums.hak5.org/

[wasab]

3 hours ago, pierom_qwerty said:

Hey all! As my first semester of School is coming to an end, I have realized that I no longer need the Windows-Only utilities which are on my computer, and I can finally move back to linux. I have used Backbox before, but I was also looking at ParrotOS. Note: I will not be accepting Kali Linux as an answer as it is hot doodoo and I am not even touching that even with a 100 foot pole. Anyways, any recommendations?

Ubuntu. The labs i did for my computer security course is entirely done in Ubuntu in fact. 

https://my.nps.edu/web/c3o/labtainer-lab-summary1

https://my.nps.edu/web/c3o/labtainers

[Sauron]

Honestly, any major distro will do fine. Ubuntu is the de-facto standard but personally I would recommend Arch if you have some time to dedicate to it.

[vorticalbox]

PopOS is my new go to for programming, use it at work and at home for programming.

[ShazXVII]

You can install all of the tools that are used in Kali and Parrot on Ubuntu just fine. Or you could just dual boot whatever flavor you want to use for daily use and the one you want to use for pentesting. I get why you wouldn't like Kali linux, but as long as you don't use it as your daily driver, there shouldn't be any problems with it. For programming you can use any distro, as there is practically no difference in programming on different flavors, except that you will use different commands for installing languages and programs. I personally use Ubuntu with an i3 derivative as my DE, and it works well for both programming and pentesting.