Parrot OS vs. Kali Linux: Can XFCE Bridge the Performance Gap?

[Alone in the Dark]

Hello Linux Community,

I want to share my recent experience regarding system performance and efficiency. I have always been a fan of Parrot Security OS; I love its tools, its philosophy, and its overall design. However, despite having a high-spec Lenovo laptop, I noticed a significant lag and slow response times when using Parrot's default environments.

Out of curiosity, I switched to Kali Linux for a while, and the difference was night and day. Kali feels incredibly fast and snappy, and I realized the secret lies in the XFCE desktop environment it uses. Everything from booting to file management is almost instant. But honestly, my heart is still with Parrot.

I have a few technical questions for the experts here:

1. Desktop Swap: Is it possible to completely replace Parrot's default environment (MATE/KDE) with XFCE?
2. Performance Consistency: If I install XFCE on Parrot, will I get the exact same "snappiness" and speed I experienced on Kali?
3. Optimization: I recently discovered that services like plocate-updatedb were slowing down my boot time by nearly 14 seconds on Kali. Are there similar "heavy" services in Parrot that I should mask to achieve a lightning-fast boot?

I am looking for a system that combines Parrot's toolset with Kali's XFCE-driven speed. Any advice on how to optimize Parrot to feel as light as a fresh Kali install would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your support!

 

[osprey]

View attachment 30982

Hello Linux Community,

I want to share my recent experience regarding system performance and efficiency. I have always been a fan of Parrot Security OS; I love its tools, its philosophy, and its overall design. However, despite having a high-spec Lenovo laptop, I noticed a significant lag and slow response times when using Parrot's default environments.

Out of curiosity, I switched to Kali Linux for a while, and the difference was night and day. Kali feels incredibly fast and snappy, and I realized the secret lies in the XFCE desktop environment it uses. Everything from booting to file management is almost instant. But honestly, my heart is still with Parrot.

I have a few technical questions for the experts here:

1. Desktop Swap: Is it possible to completely replace Parrot's default environment (MATE/KDE) with XFCE?
2. Performance Consistency: If I install XFCE on Parrot, will I get the exact same "snappiness" and speed I experienced on Kali?
3. Optimization: I recently discovered that services like plocate-updatedb were slowing down my boot time by nearly 14 seconds on Kali. Are there similar "heavy" services in Parrot that I should mask to achieve a lightning-fast boot?

I am looking for a system that combines Parrot's toolset with Kali's XFCE-driven speed. Any advice on how to optimize Parrot to feel as light as a fresh Kali install would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your support!

@Brickwizard is an aficionado on Parrot, and can answer your queries directly. Meanwhile, some more general observations that occur may be of interest.

Regarding 1. There is usually no need to replace the existing Desktop Environments when adding a new one. One can install the new one, and select it after boot up which should bring it up alone for the user to experience and assess. If one later wishes to uninstall the other Desktop Environments, it can be done, but needs care and attention to libraries and other files that they use in common to avoid loss of functionality.

Regarding 2. As for expecting the same performance of a Desktop Environment on two different distro installations, one would expect so, but it's really a matter of trying it out to see. If one distro defaults to KDE, then it's likely that KDE starts a bunch of daemons that run in the background, so that probably needs to be attended to if one is running XFCE with KDE still installed. I've lost contact with modern KDE but the daemons might include kwallet, KDE's file indexer etc. Running ps aux and inspecting the output should show what's running. XFCE uses lightdm display manager last time I used it, so that might be best installed.

Regarding 3. The updatedb program could by default be run daily as a cron job from
/etc/cron.daily/plocate, or as a systemd timer. Either way, it can be configured to run whenever the user wishes, so if that is actually causing an unacceptable delay in booting, it can be scheduled to run at another time when it makes no impact. On this machine here running systemd-analyze blame shows plocate to take up around 3 seconds on booting:

[~]$ systemd-analyze blame
10.973s connman-wait-online.service
 3.252s plocate-updatedb.service
 1.409s dev-nvme0n1p3.device
 1.408s apt-show-versions.service
 1.040s systemd-udevd.service
 <snip>

Generally whatever is installed on one fully-featured distro can be installed on another. If they use different package managers, then that needs to be taken into account, and distros can differ in their naming of programs which are functionally the same.

 

[Alone in the Dark]

@Brickwizard is an aficionado on Parrot, and can answer your queries directly. Meanwhile, some more general observations that occur may be of interest.

Regarding 1. There is usually no need to replace the existing Desktop Environments when adding a new one. One can install the new one, and select it after boot up which should bring it up alone for the user to experience and assess. If one later wishes to uninstall the other Desktop Environments, it can be done, but needs care and attention to libraries and other files that they use in common to avoid loss of functionality.

Regarding 2. As for expecting the same performance of a Desktop Environment on two different distro installations, one would expect so, but it's really a matter of trying it out to see. If one distro defaults to KDE, then it's likely that KDE starts a bunch of daemons that run in the background, so that probably needs to be attended to if one is running XFCE with KDE still installed. I've lost contact with modern KDE but the daemons might include kwallet, KDE's file indexer etc. Running ps aux and inspecting the output should show what's running. XFCE uses lightdm display manager last time I used it, so that might be best installed.

Regarding 3. The updatedb program could by default be run daily as a cron job from
/etc/cron.daily/plocate, or as a systemd timer. Either way, it can be configured to run whenever the user wishes, so if that is actually causing an unacceptable delay in booting, it can be scheduled to run at another time when it makes no impact. On this machine here running systemd-analyze blame shows plocate to take up around 3 seconds on booting:

[~]$ systemd-analyze blame
10.973s connman-wait-online.service
 3.252s plocate-updatedb.service
 1.409s dev-nvme0n1p3.device
 1.408s apt-show-versions.service
 1.040s systemd-udevd.service
 <snip>

Generally whatever is installed on one fully-featured distro can be installed on another. If they use different package managers, then that needs to be taken into account, and distros can differ in their naming of programs which are functionally the same.

"Thanks for the advice, osprey! I took your point about avoiding conflicting environments.

I'm currently downloading a clean ISO of Parrot Home 6.1 (XFCE) with Kernel 6.6. I want to avoid the 'heaviness' I felt in the previous MATE version.

What do you think? With this specific setup (XFCE + Kernel 6.6), will the performance and snappiness be on par with Kali Linux? I'm looking for that same fast response on my Lenovo machine."