And since those tools are tested to work on Kali, that's what pentesters will primarily use. Since most pentesters use Kali, developers of pentest tools test those tools to work on Kali.

It's one of those chicken-and-egg scenarios. However, depending on the chip used, it may also not be possible on Kali either. Since you asked specifically about MacOS, this may actually be one of the things you can't do on a Mac. In Kali, I can be confident, that my wireless device will work in monitor mode and that I will be able to capture data from it without having to search why channel hopping isn't working or why I can't inject frames with aireplay-ng. Getting a random chipset to work in monitor mode, so that it works with airodump-ng can be an exhausting task in Kali, but it's way worse in an OS, that has who knows what installed to manage wireless devices.

This is arguably a minor thing, but Wi-Fi pentesting can be a pain in the ass. Kali includes patched kernel modules for wireless hardware. Yes, there are tools like Homebrew, but installing multiple, incompatible versions of command line tools and libraries is usually not a recipe for success. MacOS is also notorious for including command line tools or libraries, which are either outdated or have been modified by Apple in some way, so that they don't seamlessly work with code written for Linux. That doesn't mean you can't get those tools to run on other distros, but that may include compiling stuff from sources, wading through cryptic error messages by make.essentially trying random things until it works. The configuration will already have been done so that the tool will work on this system.

There are no missing dependencies, which are not available through that distro's package manager, which I will have to compile myself. When I start a tool, I can be confident that it works. While that may not sound like a big deal to you, it is indeed a big deal for professional pentesters. Aside from the things Wouter already mentioned in his answer, there are other things, that Kali offers, which 'general purpose' operating systems don't:Īll pentesting tools are tested to work on Kali by the Kali devs.

Kali linux on macos