Kali Linux 2025.4 Ethical Hacking Distro Released With KDE Plasma 6.5, GNOME 49
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https://9to5linux.com/kali-linux-2025-4-ethical-hacking-distro-released-with-kde-plasma-6-5-gnome-49
This release also updates the Xfce desktop environment with support for color themes and introduces support for virtual machine guest tools.
Offensive Security announced today the release and general availability of Kali Linux 2025.4 as the fourth and last update to this Debian-based distribution for ethical hacking and penetration testing in 2025.
Coming almost three months after Kali Linux 2025.3, the Kali Linux 2025.4 release updates the GNOME and KDE Plasma desktop offerings to the latest GNOME 49 and KDE Plasma 6.5 releases, in addition to Xfce 4.20, which remains the default desktop environment.
The GNOME offering defaults to Wayland only, has an updated app grid that now organizes the Kali tools into folders, adopts Showtime as the default video player instead of Totem, and adds the Ctrl+Alt+T or Super+T keyboard shortcuts for quickly opening a terminal window.
The default Xfce desktop environment received some attention too in Kali Linux 2025.4 with the addition of support for color themes for icons, GTK 3/4 windows, Qt 5/6 windows, and Xfce's window manager decorations in the Appearance application.
For those running Kali Linux in a virtual machine, this release introduces support for virtual machine guest tools, such as clipboard sharing and window scaling in VirtualBox, QEMU, and VMware. The devs said that "all of the VM guest additions that you expected in X11 before are now working in Wayland without trouble."
Three new tools have been added in Kali Linux 2025.4, namely bpf-linker, a simple BPF static linker, evil-winrm-py, a Python-based tool for executing commands on remote Windows machines using WinRM, and hexstrike-ai, an MCP server that lets AI agents autonomously run tools.
Other than that, this release introduces a Halloween Mode for the Xfce desktop and updates Kali NetHunter with support for Android 16 devices like the Samsung Galaxy S10, S10e, S10 Plus, and S10 5G running LineageOS 23, improved terminal, updated Wifipumpkin3 tab with preview support, and an updated kernel install tab.
You can download Kali Linux 2025.4 from the official website in various flavors for 64-bit, ARM, VM, Cloud, WSL, or mobile platforms. Existing Kali Linux users need only to update their installations by running the sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade commands in a terminal emulator.
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