For comparison, I have chosen Kali Linux and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
RHEL was developed by Red Hat company that functioned as a Linux distributor. It is an operating system that has its development origins in North Carolina in the 1990-s when a businessman Bob Young and distribution creator Marc Ewing started to cooperate by selling Ewing’s distribution on floppy disks and CDs. The popularity of Linux grew and sales were high, so their cooperation turned into a company named Red Hat which now provides open-source software products to companies.
Kali Linux is Debian-based Linux distribution which was Developed by Offensive security. It was released in March 2013, it is much later than RHEL because it was developed in the 90-s and released in 2000. Kali Linux is also free and is promised by developers to be kept free. RHEL on the other side is free only for developer communities, others have to pay for the product by choosing a subscription with different options like server, virtual datacenters, workstations or other additional support. Kali Linux has a graphical interface and in RHEL it is provided by GNOME.
The purposes of two distros are completely different. Kali Linux is used mostly for the development of security solutions and computer forensics. It has a great number of tools for solving different cybersecurity problems, which makes this Linux distribution suitable for developers to do reverse engineering, penetration tests or security auditing. Latest Kali also consists of the Xfce desktop environment by default.
RHEL on the other hand is mainly used for server environments and designed for enterprises. It is also one of the most used distros in its field because of the features it proposes. The main one is the availability of commercial support for 10 years and more if needed. RHEL may guarantee stability and regular security patches with long-term support for enterprise users and Fedora as the community distribution.
Because of the different purposes of those operating systems, they have different target groups: one is oriented toward enterprises and the other toward security solution developers. By some resources, Kali Linux is not recommended for beginners, but for users with an intermediate knowledge of Linux.
Communities of those distributions are also different. In the case of RHEL, it does not have an explicit existence as it is a paid enterprise-oriented operating system. Kali Linux on the other hand has an active and supportive community that resides on forums. Digital forensics specialists often need to develop or explore something new so the forum for asking and discussion is vital for them. In addition to that developers may more often hear from the users about issues making the operating system better everyday.
Sources:
https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux
https://www.techotopia.com/index.php/A_Brief_History_of_Red_Hat_Linux
https://www.kali.org/features/
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