Gentoo-based distros work a bit differently from those derived from Debian or Red Hat in the areas of package management and system configuration, and tend to be a bit more complicated.
These distros are focused on a technical area of computer use, penetration testing, but that doesn’t mean they’re T not suitable for beginners in this discipline.
It’s not much of a surprise that a Gentoo-based distro like Pentoo is more complicated to use. Even installation requires some extra know-how. When Pentoo is booted, it doesn’t automatically start the graphical environment, and the network is disabled. The icon to enable networking wasn’t added to the desktop once we’d carried out an HD installation (a bug?), so we had to look online, on another computer, to find the command to get networking going. Gentoo is great, but it’s less well known than the Debian or Red Hat-derived distros, so the average Linux user would have to learn how to use the package management and other administrative functions that are specific to Gentoo.
ArchLinux (and therefore BlackArch) also assumes a certain amount of technical knowledge from its users, but as it’s not a source-based distro, it’s not quite as complicated to use as Gentoo. Having said all that, if you have only used Ubuntu, for example, you would have to learn quite a bit to administer an ArchLinux-based system. For penetration testing, you have to do more work than usual in this area. Although, some would see this as an opportunity to learn something new.
Kali is Debian-derived, so you’ll understand how to operate it from the command line if you’ve used a distro such as Debian, Ubuntu or Linux Mint. We could make the same observation about BackBox and Parrot OS as they, too, are Debian-like. Kali’s popularity means that many pen-testing tutorials assume you’re running Kali. The excellent documentation has to be taken into account, and we could say the same for Parrot OS, too.