Reader supplied reviews for Athena OS
Average rating
8.4 from 9 review(s)
Version: Rolling
Rating: 10
Date: 2025-06-30
Votes: 0
|
In QEMU/KVM vms, I tried the Athena OS Arch-based and Fedora42-based editions.
Seems a very polished OS for what it is, which is not surprising given the background of the man in GUI "Credits"; among other things, he worked 2022 with BlackArch. His efforts here seem to be to provide a more secure pentesting environment which relies on Arch or Fedora native containerization to preserve usefulness of tools against OS updates.
In either edition, a number of tools are pre-installed; as apropos you can add more with pacman or dnf; as well, you can choose a "role" on the "welcome" GUI, and it will load tools relevant to that role. Both editions I tried have access to Blackarch repository.
It seems not so much a "buggy" system as it is suffering deeply detailed documentation. For example, a casual user might see no usual "/etc/proxychains4.conf" or indeed access to much of any filesystem files as "buggy"; but in Arch-based, systemd-nspawn can raise issues like dlopen() issues so configuring in iptables for trafficwill be needed; in Fedora42-based, for proxychains4 to work you'll need good knowledge of editing SELinux.
In sum, I found both editions I tried rather hardened out of the box. But at this point Athena OS Arch- and Fedora42-based seemed to be what they claim to be, but better suited to more seasoned networking/pentesting/hacking pros...and good knowledge of Arch and Fedora containerization won't hurt.
|
Version: 23.11
Rating: 8
Date: 2024-11-25
Votes: 2
|
Has much potential. Two distro variants, one is Arch Based, the other is NIX based. That alone was enough to peak my interest. My exprience was more on the Arch side, it has some bugs with install and setup which may aggravate beginner learners, but if you're accustomed to tinkering and getting deep into your own setup, AthenaOS is ideal. It's highly customizable, being Arch based, you can choose your own custom kernel, build your own as well as access to the Arch AUR and wiki. Also having access to the massive BlackArch repo for a vast number of tools. Note: if you choose FISH as your shell which isn't fully POSIX compliant it's likely expected for some tools to break. AthenaOS quite polished and stable on the Arch setup, I hope they continue it. As for the Nix variant which is still in beta, I didn't explore too much as it was too buggy for me. I think this is where the project is focusing on in future, using the infrastructure as code and everything as a declarative dataflow config. It's intriguing and quite different to other distros, though for me, quite a learning curve to eventually learn one day. For others more technical with a NIX is the new Arch mindset that don't mind the technical learning curve like a wall, then this is an ideal distro to hone your cybersecurity craft.
|
Version: 23.11
Rating: 10
Date: 2024-06-27
Votes: 5
|
Great OS this is what id describe as "the parrot of arch" its everything you love about ParrotSec in a Arch distro you can pick your field of cybersecurity for example red team, blue team, bug bounty hunter, student and itll precompile and install the tools for your job title/field and you can always add on to it another thing i liked was it lets you choose a browser during the install, the install is easy if your used to Arch but slightly harder then say mint, parrot, kali the UI and the user friendliness of the actual OS is worth learning Arch however if you want something similar but less security oriented Garuda with blackarch repos is a close second
|
See all 9 reader reviews of Athena OS...
|
|
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
bc1qxes3k2wq3uqzr074tkwwjmwfe63z70gwzfu4lx 
lnurl1dp68gurn8ghj7ampd3kx2ar0veekzar0wd5xjtnrdakj7tnhv4kxctttdehhwm30d3h82unvwqhhxarpw3jkc7tzw4ex6cfexyfua2nr 
86fA3qPTeQtNb2k1vLwEQaAp3XxkvvvXt69gSG5LGunXXikK9koPWZaRQgfFPBPWhMgXjPjccy9LA9xRFchPWQAnPvxh5Le 
