The Linux Help and Tutorial Thread

[D_A]

Best to leave Kali well alone. It's REALLY not something that's intended for even intermediate Linux users, comes with many toys that can get you on multiple government watch lists and won't run BOINC v 6.12.x on (I tried last night) due to unmeetable (GlibC versions to be specific, updating which is likely to break the whole system) dependencies. Also, the only account set up in Kali by default is root. Unless you set them up yourself there are no user accounts. It is HIGHLY inadvisable to browse the internet from the root account. It's also built on Debian, not Ubuntu, and a lot of things are not compatible thanks to Ubuntu screwing with things and trying to go their own way. If you want a distro that's flexible enough to do pretty much whatever with minimum hassle, use Mint. Kali is also REALLY awkward to get some hardware running properly due to it's odd package version mix. I spent three days trying to get the OpenCL drivers working on it only to find out there are compatibility issues between the drivers versions and the tool I wanted to use OpenCL for. The same driver version issue affects Windows machines, it's the tool that's super fickle.

People assume that because a given piece of hardware runs in Windows it should run under Linux. That's a poor assumption. Mac hardware often doesn't run on Windows but do people blame Windows for that? No. They realise that someone somewhere has to write the drivers for that hardware and if a given OS is not their intended market then they won't be writing the drivers to suit. Most of the time Linux developers step up and make things work, but some hardware is just too obscure, poorly made, or even too expensive to be obtainable by people working for nothing (or within tight budgets) and so not worth the trouble. There are multiple lists of what hardware is supported by Linux and what drivers are required if people take the time to look for them. using incompatible hardware is the user's fault, not the operating system no matter if they're using Linux, Mac OS or Windows.