I am always looking for interesting new developments in security analysis and penetration testing, and have been attending SANS Security conferences for a few years now, which has introduced me to several Linux distributions that I was not otherwise familiar with.
Initially the most popular was Knoppix, then focus moved to BackTrack Linux, and finally last year when it seemed that BackTrack might disappear, Kali Linux picked up the torch.
Although I have always installed whatever Linux they were using in the class on my laptop, I never seemed to keep it for very long afterward. Something always came up – either they weren’t flexible enough, or updates were too difficult, or they were just based on a Linux distribution which was too old to begin with.