Parrot OS 6.4 ships with Linux 6.12 LTS, new tools and updated system packages

Parrot OS 6.4 has been released, bringing a ton of updates and under-the-hood improvements, including the latest Linux Long-Term Support kernel, version 6.12, which landed last year.

If you have not heard of it before, Parrot OS is a Linux distribution based on Debian that focuses on security and privacy. It is a full toolkit for penetration testers, digital forensics experts, and more.

The development team also updated a mountain of security tools. Major players like Metasploit jumped to version 6.4.71, PowerShell Empire hit 6.1.2, and the web application security proxy Caido is now at 0.48.1.

This release also brings an updated browser, Firefox 140 ESR, complete with Parrot's own privacy enhancements. The team had to wrestle with this update, as Firefox changed how it loads configurations.

They put a clever fix in place to automatically restore their custom privacy settings after any Firefox update, so its telemetry does not phone home. Plus, a bunch of Microsoft's developer tools, like PowerShell 7.5 and .NET SDKs, are now directly installable from Parrot's repositories.

A few new launchers were added to the menu, and Rocket, the communication platform has finally been added to the official repos. To install it on your system, you just run this:

sudo apt install rocket

Getting the new version is straightforward. If you are already running Parrot, to upgrade, you simply need to open a terminal and run a single command.

sudo parrot-upgrade
# or
sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade

There are updates to many system packages like curl (now 8.14.1), the Go language toolchain golang-go (2:1.23), and systemd (up to 254.26). The included Chromium browser also made a leap to version 138.0.7204.92.

The team says it's quite likely that 6.4 will be the last release in the 6.x branch before they roll out version 7.

The next major version is already in development and will be built on top of the upcoming Debian 13, with plans to introduce support for different desktop environments and even RISC-V architecture.

Full release notes are available here, and you can install Parrot OS from here.