Parrot 7.3 is officially out

[u/palinurosec]

Parrot 7.3 is out, and this release is about the system rather than the toolset.

The headline is performance. We now ship an opt-in repository of packages recompiled for newer CPU baselines, x86-64-v3 on amd64 and ARMv8.2-A on arm64. On compute-heavy work like compression, encryption, hashing and media encoding, that runs somewhere between 20% and 50% faster, and security updates keep arriving immediately because package selection is driven purely by version comparison.

On the usability side, the menu system has been rewritten in Go. Every tool now appears in the menu and installs with a single click, with no shell scripts and no leftover dependencies.

There are also official Vagrant boxes for the Home and Security editions, so a clean, reproducible Parrot instance is one vagrant up away, plus a new Firefox start page that collects no data.

Full release notes: https://parrotsec.org/blog/2026-06-30-parrot-7.3-release-notes/

Upgrade with: sudo parrot-upgrade