The distribution ships with the latest kernel which is carefully patched with fixes and drivers for most modern hardware.

Kanotix is an ideal tool for testing, data rescue, or for working and safe surfing and mailing on different machines e.g. in an Internet cafe.

As Kanotix comes with unionfs and aufs-support one can "install" additional packages by using APT (via connection to the Internet).

Using USB flash drive (when supported by BIOS), is of course much faster than booting from CD or DVD.

The acritoxinstaller is a KDE/Qt frontend and a bash backend and comes with a user-friendly interface and several advanced features: e.g. LVM support, dmraid support, automatic partitioning (including ntfsresize-support), installation to USB-HDDs.

After problems with the stability in 2006 Jörg "Kano" Schirottke decided to move from Debian Sid to a less volatile basis.

[11] The co-developer and other of the Kanotix-Team wanted to stay with Debian-Sid and left the project, to start sidux, a new distribution based on Debian sid.

After the Debian-Etch-Release in April 2007 Kanotix was no longer compatible with Debian Sid.

It ships with KDE Software Compilation 4 for 32-Bit and 64-Bit architecture and a complete new branding stuff, new kernel (2.6.38), LibreOffice 3.3.2 and more.

[25] New features in Kanotix-Dragonfire are: booting from/with DVD, USB, UEFI (PCs, Intel Macs), an embedded USB-Stick ImageWriter for Mac OS X and the USB-Stick with Hybrid-ISO can now be made persistent from the live-system.

In the KDE-Special version the extra 3D graphics drivers from nvidia and AMD and the Steam-client are already preinstalled.

An updated release of the stable Kanotix was presented at LinuxTag 2014 in Berlin.

[32] Kanotix Steelfire is based on current stable Debian 9 ("Stretch").

New is the Calamares-Installer (now in test version), wayland, refind, the current LibreOffice and a new kernel (6.6-13.1).