Kali Linux, a popular Linux distribution for cybersecurity research and penetration testing, just revealed the Kali Linux 2025.4 release. This new build has updates to GNOME, KDE, and Xfce desktop environments, improvements for virtual machines, and much more.
Kali Linux is primarily a rolling release distribution, so the system components are updated frequently throughout the year—other operating systems like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian hold back packages for the next point release. Kali also offers periodic snapshot releases with packages held back, though, and the latest one just arrived as version 2025.4.
This is the first snapshot release with GNOME 49, which has Showtime as the new video player, Papers as the new document viewer, faster performance for the Software app store, lock screen media controls, a new Do Not Disturb toggle, better HDR support, and many other improvements. The Kali team specifically called out folder support in the app launcher as a helpful change, since it places all Kali tools in helpful categorized sections.
The KDE environment has also been updated to Plasma 6.5, with some substantial improvements from the Plasma 6.3 version that was previously shipping. There’s a new screenshot tool, more flexible window tiling, quick access to pinned clipboard items in the panel, and fuzzy matching support for KRunner to help with typos.
The GNOME, KDE, and Xfce desktops all have updated color themes in this release. The Kali team explained in a blog post, “We wanted to bring support for color themes to Xfce, putting it on par with the already available settings in the other desktops (GNOME and KDE). Now you can fully customize the colors of your Kali installation with the new themes for icons, GTK 3/4 windows, Qt 5/6 windows, and Xfce’s window manager decorations.”
Kali Linux is now using Wayland as the only display protocol for GNOME desktop, and Wayland has already been the default option for KDE since Kali Linux 2023.1. However, some of the virtual machine guest utilities only worked with X11, until now. When you’re running Kali Linux in a virtual machine with Wayland, features like clipboard sharing and window scaling should all work correctly.
There are also updates to Kali’s built-in tools. Besides the new features and bug fixes for Kali NetHunter, there are three new tools: bpf-linker (a BPF static linker), evil-winrm-py (for executing commands on remote Windows PCs), and hexstrike-ai (an MCP server for AI agents). Kali is also now using Linux kernel 6.16.
Finally, there’s a change to downloading Kali: the live boot image will only be available through BitTorrent. It’s approaching the 5GB size limit for Kali’s CloudFlare CDN, and the team wanted to avoid customizing it or removing tools from all versions of Kali Linux. Many of the other images can still be downloaded through a web browser, though, including the main installer and several pre-built virtual machines. It’s still available as of the time of writing, but it’s a 4.9GB download, so the next update could push it over the line.
If you already have Kali Linux installed, you can just run the update process to get the latest version. For a fresh install, head over to the Kali Linux website for downloads and torrent links.
Source: Kali Blog
