Athena OS

Reader supplied reviews for Athena OS Average rating 8.0 from 10 review(s) Please specify which version of the distribtion you are reviewing. Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on Athena OS? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 26.0325.11Rolling23.112023.06.23 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: Rolling Rating: 4 Date: 2026-01-15 Votes: 0 good OS and allows you to choose role for the job to be done under almost any cybersecurity role with preinstalled tools thatll help any student or professional. From my experience it does not make a good VM OS it gets very buggy in virtualbox and VMware I have not tried this distro barebones due to a failed install on a dedicated Dell Vostro. I am wanting to try the NIXos version however with the bugs and stuff plaguing the Arch version right now Im not too motivated to try since I do have blackArch and Parrot that work fine. I will say out of all the security distros this is one I want to see take over the scene the developer is a great person as well. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: Rolling Rating: 10 Date: 2025-06-30 Votes: 4 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. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 23.11 Rating: 8 Date: 2024-11-25 Votes: 3 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. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 10 reader reviews of Athena OS...