It's also much much lighter than the 2 because it doesn't try to be flashy in it's appearance, although I do like the minimalistic build. It's Ubuntu based (Debian + it's own repositories) and offers a similar anonymizing system as Anonsurf. This will also give you a chance to try out different OS's quickly and see which you like. So save you the headache of running through wiping hardware and this and that and just get used to VM work. In many environments you're going to be working with, you'll do everything in virtualization. Virtualization also offers easy back up and restore since many things you're gonna dive into both via School and on your own, will possibly break the OS's you're going to use. Many books out there although outdated can be worked through with some ingenutiy, basic linux experience, and the google, most issues you'll run into can be solved.

I would also begin looking at building a virtual lab. But Upgrades always seem to be it's downfall. In many reviews it's praised more highly than Kali due to it being able to be used as an everyday driver. Be warned: Parrot has had numerous issues with stability between version builds. Kali has a top 10 build now which is somewhat nice but then still misses key things that are common in most security builds so whatever. It makes Linux management so much easier. Also learn automation through shell and python scripting. Especially things such as NMAP and it's various tools within itself. See what are the common tools between Kali and Parrot (IMO both are bloated to hell but that's just my opinion) and start to learn them. If you're taking a cyber security course, I would look into the security edition. If you loose your data because of an infrastructure incident, dont blame the provider, blame yourself for poor design. With this in mind, remember to keep your infrastructure resilient and regularly backed up. There is argument of using KVM on Linux but I've always just naturally used Virtualbox so sticking with familiarity. Despite the events in Strasbourg, our disaster recovery plan worked amazingly well. On the hardbox I do programming/docker work and everything else is virtualized. I recently swapped back to Debian 10 from Parrot as I had yet another Kernel Panic running Parrot OS. If you took the time, you can download ubuntu and clear everything out and build Parrot yourself with all the tools and configurations. Kali is good in a lab environment simply because many things are based on Kali in terms of Cyber Security Courses.

Parrot security os 3.10