The latest version of Kali Linux, 2025.4, has been released, bringing significant changes and new features to the popular Linux distribution. One of the key changes is the complete transition of the graphical environment from X11 to Wayland. This means that X11 sessions will now only work through XWayland.
The distribution has been updated to Linux kernel 6.16 and GNOME 49. Additionally, new tools have been added, including bpf-linker for working with BPF, evil-winrm-py for remote Windows management, and hexstrike-ai, an MCP server for AI agents. The support for guest utilities for VirtualBox, VMware, and QEMU under Wayland has also been improved.
Due to the increased size of the Live image (over 5 GB), the developers have decided to no longer provide direct HTTP downloads. Instead, the full image is now available only through BitTorrent, a practice that has already been adopted for the 15 GB 'Everything' variant.