Parrot OS 7.1: Security Distro’s Surprisingly Good Daily Driver

From white-hat hackers to casual users: Italy’s Parrot OS 7.1 Home Edition flies beyond its security reputation with a surprisingly polished KDE Plasma desktop.

The FOSS Force Distro of the Week — Parrot 7.1 Home Edition

Quick, name me a distro that, straight up, flaps its wings and says “Polly want a cracker…”

Welcome to this week’s Distro of the Week, Italy’s Parrot 7.1 KDE Plasma Home Edition.

Among the hacker set, Parrot needs little introduction. However, to the unwashed masses of other Linux users, Parrot Linux — also known as Parrot OS — is a Debian based Linux distribution laser-focused on security, privacy, and development, and is a regular go-to for white-hat hackers.

The default desktop environment on Parrot 7.1 is KDE Plasma. But following community requests, there are also Parrot 7.1 spins featuring the MATE and LXQt desktop environments, along with the Enlightenment window manager.

It comes in two main editions, called Security and Home. Security is the flagship. It includes penetration testing and cybersecurity tools for professionals and researchers. Home Edition, which comes without the security tools, is for everyday use with a focus on privacy options, although users can opt to add developer tools or security software if they want.

Although Parrot is best known for its Security Edition, for purposes of this review we’re going against the grain and running the Home Edition.

However, I would be remiss if I didn’t include one of Parrot 7.1’s main developments in Security Edition, which is a tool called mcpwn. It’s designed specifically to allow Large Language Models such as Claude, Gemini, or even local LLMs to run cybersecurity tools.

“The tool stands out for its security‑oriented architecture, which isolates command execution inside protected Docker containers to prevent unauthorized access to the host system,” the project points out in the release notes.

Installing Parrot 7.1

Minimum system requirements are reasonable: a dual-core processor with at least 2 GB of RAM – 4 GB or more recommended – and 20 GB available storage. According to the project’s website, there’s no specific graphics card required, but an internet connection is recommended.

With the Parrot 7.1 3 GB ISO downloaded and put onto a USB stick, the install is a fairly straightforward. It’s a Calamares-based installation, complete with the standard time zone, keyboard, login/password, and disk setup prompts. After that, I was on the information superhighway, so to speak, with the distro.

On boot, the Plymouth-based splash screen might be a bit disconcerting, with the static-laden Parrot logo going in and out of focus for almost a full minute. That’s by design from the — jolly joke — developers… Also, the login screen goes through several interesting digital contortions before finally offering the desktop.

Once you’re up and running, you’ll find that Parrot 7.1’s modified KDE Plasma desktop is – to their significant credit – quite unassuming. Under the hood it lacks many of the KDE-based programs that usually accompany a KDE Plasma-based distro. It retains such KDE mainstays as the Dolphin file manager and Konsole terminal emulator, but it’s dramatically pared down its use of KDE’s vast library of peripheral software.

The “look” of the distro is cleaner than on most Plasma-based distros, and offers some unique items in the top panel. For example, front and center are bar graphs measuring CPU, memory use, and network speed, as well as four visible workspaces in the upper right of the panel. To the left of the workspaces are the standard audio, Bluetooth, brightness, WiFi, status, and notification icons – all standard for KDE Plasma, but oddly more presentable here.

Kicking the Tires

Parrot 7.1 comes with a wide array of software, including LibreOffice, GIMP, and the VLC media player, among others. It also comes with not only one, but two web browsers – Firefox ESR and Tor.

On the downside, Parrot 7.1 lacked any sort of email client, as if perhaps hackers don’t use email. Even if they didn’t, this is the Home version, and most of us non-hackers actually do use email — some of us regularly. Anyway, it was off to Synaptic to download and install Thunderbird.

I’ll admit that I didn’t really evaluate some of the pentesting and other tools the distro makes available because quite frankly, those aren’t in my wheelhouse. I fired up some of the testing software and poked around a bit, but I really didn’t do much. I did use the Tor browser for the most part while using Parrot 7.1, and found it to be quite useful once I got the hang of it.

Meanwhile, when put through paces that would be normal for average users, the distro responded as if it were a simple walk in the park. As far as multitasking goes, the distro handled multiple programs with aplomb, and I had to struggle to get the distro to go above 3 GB RAM when using multiple apps, which is good news for those using older hardware.

Listening to Yes while reading email was a joy, and the fact that the distro played well with web apps like Google Docs and Google Drive was clearly a positive.

Final Thoughts

Despite having more tools than the average user would use in a lifetime — trufflebog, anyone?– Parrot 7.1 still comes across as one of the most consummate, if not the most complete, distros available. The project’s interpretation of the KDE Plasma desktop — specifically including the most important bits while making the desktop quite presentable — is a feather in the distro’s proverbial cap.

One caveat, which admittedly might be a hardware problem with one of the laptops I was using: During one test run on a Dell Latitude E6440, the CPU temperature started climbing past 70 degrees Celsius while merely running Facebook on Firefox. After my attempts to keep it cooler were unsuccessful, I shut it down and went to the other laptops, which handled that task — and others — within a much more manageable temperature range.

Despite this hiccup, overall Parrot 7.1 worked without major incident. For a distro that is a penetration tester’s – sorry, “pentester’s” – standard to have a version for the rest of us that works so well was no small feat, and Parrot 7.1 succeeds with flying colors.

You can grab whichever desktop version of Parrot 7.1 you prefer from Parrot’s download page.

Do you have a distro you think would make a great feature for FOSS Force’s Distro of the Week? Don’t be shy—let us know! Offer your suggestions in the comments below (or use the “contact us” link under our masthead) and we’ll make an effort to make it so… No suggestion is too mainstream or too niche—let us know what you’d like to see!

…and suddenly we’re in the mood to listen to something from Yes’s 1969 debut album.