[Equinox]

I feel like this mostly goes unnoticed in the realm of pentesting-related operating systems. Most people are either on the side of Kali Linux or of Black Arch, or some other.

First and foremost I'll say that I'm not a pentester, I have minimal experience in "hacking," but I'd like to bring some attention to Arch Strike.

Arch Strike is not* an operating system, but rather a repository of programs that can be downloaded. This, I think, is much more preferable to use than to download and install something like Kali Linux, which has a bunch of baked in programs.

*You can download an ISO of Arch Strike, but it's just Arch Linux with the repositories pre-configured for you.

Any Arch-based Linux installation can easily add the Arch Strike repositories to their pacman configuration file. This also applies to various distributions that are based on Arch (e.g. Majaro), or your own installation of linux if you have the pacman package manager installed.

Example of the pacman configuration file:

Code:

[archstrike] Server = https://mirror.archstrike.org/$arch/$repo

There is a little bit more that should be done, which you can find here.
I've personally known about Arch Strike for years, and I'm surprised more people don't know about it.

[Oni]

As you say, Arch Strike is more of a repository and Kali is an OS with a bunch of tools pre-installed. Prior to Arch Strike, some people used Katoolin or similar solutions.

I'd say operating system preference (preinstalled or repo), between Debian and Arch will be the biggest factor in a person's decision what they use.