Kali Linux 2025.4 Final Release: GNOME is Now Wayland Exclusive, New Pentesting Tools Added
Kali Linux 2025.4 has been released—the final update of the year for the distribution relied upon by cybersecurity professionals and ethical hackers for penetration testing, security audits, and network research.
As with every release, the developers have introduced new tools—three this time: bpf-linker, a lightweight static linker for BPF; evil-winrm-py, a Python utility for remote command execution on Windows systems via WinRM; and hexstrike-ai, an MCP server that enables AI agents to autonomously orchestrate tools.
Significant changes have arrived across desktop environments. GNOME has been upgraded to version 49 and has fully dropped X11 support, now running exclusively on Wayland. The update also brings refreshed themes, a new video player called Showtime, and reorganized tool directories within the application grid. At last, global keyboard shortcuts for quickly launching the terminal have been added—Ctrl+Alt+T or Win+T.
KDE Plasma has advanced to version 6.5, featuring improved window tiling, an updated screenshot utility, and more flexible fuzzy search in KRunner. Xfce now gains color theme support, aligning it with capabilities long available in GNOME and KDE.
With GNOME now operating solely on Wayland, the Kali team has introduced full guest utilities support for VirtualBox, VMware, and QEMU virtual machines.
Kali NetHunter expands device compatibility, adding support for Android 16 on the Samsung Galaxy S10 and OnePlus Nord, as well as Android 15 on the Xiaomi Mi 9. The NetHunter terminal has also been restored, with updated compatibility for Magisk versions that use interactive mode.
Additional changes include the distribution of Kali Live images exclusively via BitTorrent due to increased image size, alongside the addition of three new mirrors in Asia and one in the United States.
The new release can be downloaded—or existing installations upgraded—via the official website. A comprehensive changelog is available on the Kali blog.
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