Cybersecurity engineers and pentesters don’t need Kali or Parrot. You don’t need Proxmox to use LXC and KVM. You don’t need OpenMediaVault to have Samba and NFS shares. You don’t need Clonezilla to make use of the OCS toolkit. You don’t need LMDE to have a Debian OS with Cinnamon and nonfree drivers installed, or Endeavour to have Arch with KDE Plasma.
But it’s sure as shit good to have everything packed together and preconfigured by professionals.
Or if not professionals at least someone who knows more about it than yourself.
And even if they don’t, they know enough to do it to a level I am happy to not bother doing it myself.
We already have NixOS, why anything else?
(Guix is cool too).
A good wiki for it?
https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/NixOS_Wiki
Still lacking a bit of information about specific stuff.
Unofficial should have the same information, but sometimes there is a discrepancy.
https://search.nixos.org/options
For any option you might need the name of.
https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/options.html
For basically anything else where you just have the implementation documentation
But what if… I took Debian, and disguised it as my own distro? Ho ho ho! Delightfuly devilish, Seymore!
I daily Debian because I realized all of the distros I tried and liked were Debian based. That was 20 years ago.
Ubuntu, Knoppix and MEPIS? I first used Ubuntu in 2006, but it was still very immature then. I didn’t really know much about any other Debian derivatives.
The other big one that was popular was Mandrake but that was rpm based, and a bit later PClinuxOS which was Mandrake based. I didn’t think Debian derivatives were much of a thing then aside from Ubuntu.
There are at least a couple of distros that are based on Ubuntu. Mint is a popular example. I’d say that based on Ubuntu means it is also a Debian derivative.