Kali Linux - new user questions

Putting together the software end of things for teaching myself cybersecurity tools like Nessus within Kali Linux. Kinesthetic learner, so full hands-on approach w/ YT tutorials. I've narrowed down which Kali Linux (Containers, Virtual Machine, WSL) seem suitable but not certain which best suits my needs. So going to lay out my current study situation and asking your feedback.

1) Whichever of the three Kali Linux versions I use, want to put it on an external drive (SSD is 250 GB, regret not getting higher capacity, but not planning to upgrade/replace PC soon). To your knowledge, where it's installed should have no effect whatsoever on its performance? Far as I've learned w/ various software, it doesn't care where you install it.

2) New to cybersecurity tools, and from watching tutorials, seems best place to be curious is Kali Linux where needn't worry about affecting my hardware. Are there any particular YT channels you'd recommend?

3) To maintain curiosity and desire to learn in Kali Linux, I'm thinking 2-3 hours study daily. Work full-time 2nd shift 5 days a week along with cooking my own food, so planned part-time to avoid burnout. For hobbies and the like, to cultivate and maintain skills like logic, are there any particular ones you've found helpful? Exercise, long walks in sun, learning a musical instrument, reading, creative writing, and tried many others besides. Simply, I want to ensure that between Kali Linux lessons, I'm better preparing myself for the next one.

Thanks in advance!

1 - If you have a seperate drive for Kali then choose the bare metal installer, burn that to a USB stick, boot from that USB (you may need to check/change BIOS settings for this), and install Kali to your SSD drive.

Don't forget to create an EFI partition on the SSD too, and install Kali GRUB there, then your drive is a portable Kali machine, plug it in and it will work everywhere, you'll just have to boot from it!

Even USB 2 was capable of 480 Mbps so you may be a bit slower than a decent external SSD drive (typically around 530 Mbps) with USB 2 connections.
If you have USB 3 port, use that, even base USB 3 is capable of 5 Gbps, that's faster than any external SSD thats connected with USB A type ports.

2 - There are so many resources, and good and bad in all of them, Kali is just a toolset, and a great many of its tools could be installed and used from any platform including Mac OSX or Windows, Kali just makes it easy to get started as its already set up ready to go out of the box so to speak.

What I would recommend is a little reading and watching videos around the other things you should get a good idea of, such as how networks and network addressing works (subnetting especially), the way in which data is sent over the 7 layers of the OSI stack, as different attacks can target different layers of this.

If you haven't already, get a feel for the other operating systems that you haven't used, you can always use virtual machines for this task.

A good book to start with is, 'Linux Basics for Hackers', if you haven't had lots of Linux experience, most tools in Kali mean you'll be spending a lot of time in a terminal, so it pays to get familiar with Linux in general and that volume also includes some basic scripting and some knowledge about some of the most important tools you will use. It does of course, use Kali for its examples, and gives you tasks to complete at the end of each chapter to cement the knowledge.

3 - 90% of hacking can be tedious and frustrating, it pays to get up and move around every now and then, and often its that time away from the computer where you have that eureka thought that cracks it!

Hack the Box or Try hack me can be good sources of testing material, and there are lots of write ups on the internet if you get too stuck, and as the OSCP motto says, if you didn't crack it the first time, try harder!

You'll note the layout of the Kali menu isn't by accident, it starts with section 1, and thats the 'first phase' gathering intel, then section 2 tools, looking for vulnerabilities, and so on, so my advice for learning, work through the menu sections in order to start with, launch the various tools, use their help files, and if unsure how it works, do a search for 'how do I use xyz tool' and you'll find plenty of info, some of it really good!

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Originally Posted by Brom2855

Kinesthetic learner, so full hands-on approach w/ YT tutorials. I've narrowed down which Kali Linux (Containers, Virtual Machine, WSL) seem suitable but not certain which best suits my needs.

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I taught myself to use every computer and computer OS I've3ever touched and waster $10 on the OpenSolaris Bible, having a Solaris desktop up and running by getting my hands on it before I got past the foreword..

That said., use the Installer medium and install it on bare metal. Then get your hands on it as see what makes it tick. It's like Debian if you have any questions.

I have a couple Kali boxen I use for general purpose desktops.